THE DEATH OF SCIENCE A COMPANION STUDY TO MARTÍN LÓPEZ CORREDOIRA'S THE TWILIGHT OF THE SCIENTIFIC AGE ANDREW HOLSTER Universal-Publishers Boca Raton 2 The Death of Science: A Companion Study to Martín López Corredoira's The Twilight of the Scientific Age Copyright © 2016 Andrew Thomas Holster All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Universal Publishers Boca Raton, Florida • USA 2016 ISBN-10: 1-62734-076-9 ISBN-13: 978-1-62734-076-2 www.brownwalker.com Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication Data 3 Names: Holster, Andrew. | López Corredoira, M. (Martín), 1970The twilight of the scientific age. Title: The death of science : a companion study to Martín López Corredoira's The twilight of the scientific age / Andrew Holster. Description: Boca Raton, FL : Universal Publishers, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016935687 | ISBN 978-1-62734-076-2 (pbk.) | ISBN 978-1-62734-077-9 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Science--Philosophy. | Science--History. | Science-Political aspects. | Science--Methodology. | Peer review. | BISAC: SCIENCE / History. | SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects. | SCIENCE / Research & Methodology. Classification: LCC Q174.8 .H65 2016 (print) | LCC Q174.8 (ebook) | DDC 500--dc23. 4 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. ...................................................................................................6 PART 1. THE TWILIGHT OF SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY. ................................24 López Corredoira's perspective. .................................................................24 Heterodoxy and orthodoxy. ........................................................................28 Philosophy of science and philosophy in sciences...................................36 Scientific realism and truth. .........................................................................39 The tragic example of Pavel Tichy. ............................................................43 López Corredoira's fundamental problem. ...............................................46 Explanation as the key quality criterion.....................................................52 Kantianism versus empiricism. ...................................................................56 The ether: an exception in López Corredoira's examples.......................65 Heterodox water science. .............................................................................67 Heterodox brain science. .............................................................................69 The prospect of revolutionary science.......................................................72 The scope of science.....................................................................................75 Scientific bigotry and the scientistic ideology. ..........................................82 Materialism and naturalistic metaphysics...................................................91 PART 2. DEATH BY PEER REVIEW. ................................................................107 López Corredoira on peer review.............................................................109 Background of peer review examples. .....................................................111 Peer review example 1. ...............................................................................113 The power of precedent.............................................................................137 Peer review example 2. ...............................................................................140 Summary of peer reviews...........................................................................154 The general failure of peer review. ...........................................................155 Preprint sites: arXiv.org. ..............................................................................158 Preprint sites: philsci-archive. ........................................................................162 Proposal for a new journal publication system. .....................................168 PART 3. DEATH BY BUREAUCRACY. ..............................................................172 The social context: bureaucratisation of science and society. ..............172 Mediocrity and the stratification effect....................................................174 The scarce resource driver of mediocrity. ...............................................182 A real example: NZ Ministry of Education Research. ..........................187 The state-corporate context of science....................................................196 Corporatisation of NZ public science. ....................................................199 Neo-liberal reform of NZ science............................................................200 The dominance of elite power-cliques.....................................................204 The voodoo science of neo-liberal business management. ..................206 The rule-based world view and moral philosophy.................................209 Drivers of the rule-based world view.......................................................216 5 Reflections of the rule-based world view in science..............................222 Wasting the time of our lives. ...................................................................236 PART 4. RESPONSES TO THE CRISIS OF SCIENCE. .......................................249 PART 5. APPENDICES. ......................................................................................262 Appendix 1. T.D. Lee. Symmetries, Asymmetries, and the World of Particles.........................................................................................................262 Appendix 2. Einstein's view of the Aether. ............................................269 Appendix 3. The time reversal operator in quantum mechanics.........273 Appendix 4. A realist interpretation of time in Special Relativity. ......274 Appendix 5. A logical contradiction in positivist semantics.................280 Appendix 6. Possible world metaphysics. ...............................................283 Appendix 7. The Alvarez Controversy. ...................................................293 Appendix 8. Evolving Peer Review Processes. ......................................297 Appendix 9. Predatory publishers: Beall's List. ......................................300 Appendix 10. Open Access Journals: paying for the privilege. ...........303 Appendix 11. ORCID: Meta-organisation of researchers. ...................305 Appendix 12. Nicky Hager: politically modified science. .....................307 Appendix 13. Rupert Sheldrake: ten dogmas of science.......................315 REFERENCES. ......................................................................................................98 WEB REFERENCES. ..........................................................................................101 WEB REFERENCES HOLSTER. ........................................................................102 6 INTRODUCTION. "In the temple of science are many mansions, ... and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of past and present times left inside... If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers." Albert Einstein, 1918. Address for Max Plank's 60th Birthday. Modern science is in a state of unprecedented crisis. It is suffering from a chronic illness that has been advancing steadily since 1960's, finally accelerating to fatal proportions in the last decade. While technology runs rampant today, transforming our physical and social worlds beyond recognition, the creative vocation of scientist and the institutions of science that originally produced the platforms for this technology are in a death-spiral. This is testified by a growing flood of criticism from leading scientists in recent years, about the failures of scientific institutions, and their corruption by larger ideologies of power and wealth and bureaucracy that have come to rule our world. Martín López Corredoira's The Twilight of the Scientific Age (2013, Brown Walker) is a particularly striking critique, giving a vivid and scathing analysis of the state of modern science. López Corredoira is both a serious scientist and a philosopher, and it is this combination that gives his account a depth and resonance beyond the more conventional critiques of ordinary scientists simply lamenting their working conditions. I take López Corredoira's text as the starting point of this book, and explore key themes in greater detail, following his style of putting forward frank criticism, informed by personal examples. The result is a grim prognosis for the survival of science in its present institutionalised structures. These are not structures suited to science, but forced on it by the larger bureaucratised organisation of a state-controlled capitalist society. Science is fatally corrupted by the forces that flourish in this mode of organisation: ambition, greed, power politics, mass propaganda and intellectual mediocrity. López Corredoira concludes that science, in this modern institutionalised form, is a on its death-bed. Here I analyse the process of its death. In the remainder of this Introduction I briefly recapitulate key themes and conclusions. 7 López Corredoira's account is part sociology, part history and part philosophy. He recounts a breakdown in scientific culture, seen through examples of cultural syndromes at one level (mediocrity, bureaucracy, greed, competition); but also considered as the inevitable passage of a stage of civilisation in the larger panorama of history. He suggests that the most meaningful scientific research has now been completed in many core sciences, and the bulk of 'new research' being undertaken is largely derivative, a waste of time, and increasingly expensive. He sees a lack of scientific imagination, and a lack of scientific leadership, with the executive decisions of science ruled by bureaucratic mediocrity. He sees a conformist senior scientific community, and a powerful influence of scientific censorship and propaganda, working for the exclusion of heterodox or challenging or original ideas. He laments the flood of useless information drowning out wisdom or philosophy, and thinks science as we know it is in its twilight. This will surely conflict with popularist perceptions of the success of science. Most people no doubt think science today is strong, mainly because they see new technology – shiny new computerised machinery and production systems, spawned on a vast scale. These are systems locking us into dependency on global networks of industry, finance, communications, energy, transport, food production, medicine; and harnessing our human lives to goals imposed by wealth and power elites. But while this technology looks like advanced science to outsiders, it is not science at all: it is merely the crude beginnings of an era of robotic automation. The scientific revolutions and discoveries that enabled this technology occurred some decades ago: it has just taken industry these decades to develop the machinery these discoveries make possible. Science itself is forgotten, and our scientific institutions are now converted to industrial-bureaucratic corporates, dominated by swarms of technologists and managers of the most mediocre scientific ability. In the meantime, the real scientists, the rare creative talents intent on science as a form of intellectual discovery, have left the building. There is both an intellectual and a pragmatic dimension to this crisis. Intellectually, we see the corruption of the ideals of science, the exile of its most gifted personalities, and a fatally diminished intellectual culture. This may appear an abstract concern to most people, but it is a tragedy for the tiny minority of intellectuals who find themselves excluded from their natural vocation. And without the contribution of this tiny minority of creative genius, science as an intellectual and idealistic pursuit dies. This book, like López Corredoira's, is in fundamentally support of these intellectuals and ideals. This corruptions of ideals is also entwined with pragmatic failures of science. The question we must ask is this: can we afford to let the intellectual 8 spirit of science die so soon after spawning such vast technological power? Our technologies are far from sustainable: they are still crude and transitional, and dependence on them in their current fragile state will be disastrous. The corporatisation of science transfers power over the scientific endeavour to a corporate management elite, with the vision of engaging a vast work-force of standardised, interchangeable scientific technicians in a 'science factory', controlled by prescribed rules and processes. But this excludes the scientific intellect, the critical role of the creative intellectual. Without the ongoing application of real scientific intellect, we are trapped in a half-built building that will eventually collapse on our heads. More generally, it should be stressed that technological power does not solve any of the serious problems we face, unless used intelligently and benevolently. Our present system delivers tools of vast power, produced by the efforts of our rarest intellectuals, into the hands of spoilt children: the domineering personalities who rule business, politics and bureaucracy, egocentrically obsessed with their personal success, trapped in their sense of their own importance, ruled by simplistic visions of competition and superiority. Without intelligent guidance, advanced technology is more dangerous than helpful. The death of the scientific intellect recounted here leaves us without the critical intellectual function, in either scientific or public or corporate institutions, to address our real problems. These are real and urgent problems for the very survival of our civilisation entering a period of unprecedented globalisation and cultural turmoil. The immediate source of failure is evident to scientists themselves: the bureaucratic-corporate-capitalist system is a failure when applied to the creative intellectual domain of science. Recent years have seen a growing flood of criticism from leading figures within science – including many aging Nobel laureates of the past, who can see how dramatically science has declined in quality in their own life-times. Science today is variously criticised from within its own ranks as being obsessively bureaucratised and institutionalised; commercialised and corrupted by greed; drowning in mediocrity; exhausted in imagination; trapped in authoritarian dogmas; bigoted and exclusive of heterodoxy; and failing to meet multiple challenges of our time. These are not exaggerations. On the philosophical side, science is a system of thought that is meant to help us make sense of our lives as human beings, to help us to understand the natural world and our place in it. This was its explicit aim when it originated as natural philosophy, in the 17th – 19th centuries, before it became compartmentalised into the specialised technical silos of today. But here modern science has also become a dismal failure. The 'scientific philosophy' that gained dominance over science institutions in the C20th, propagandised by leading Establishment figures as the 'scientific world view', has long appeared empty of meaning or wisdom. This modern 'scientific philosophy' is an incoherent kludge of Positivist-Materialist-Empiricist doctrines, long 9 abandoned by serious philosophers themselves. But it remains a distinct integument of the scientific culture, providing a powerful ideological function, ensuring conformity and a sense of superiority and solidarity. It is an intractable intellectual failure of our time, and has offered nothing useful to real philosophy or real science for many decades. Although in the 192030's 'scientific philosophy' originally sparked valuable developments in logic and technical analysis, it soon became bogged down in scientistic dogmas. Transplanted from Europe to America, the second wave of C20th Positivism emerged as a doctrinal worship of scientific authority, and a contempt for any other systems of thought. The philosophy of science proper, the academic forum where such questions are meant to be discussed, has now become an archaic tea ceremony; a specialist self-referring field that makes little contact with real philosophy or real science or real life. It is fixated on abstract dogmas (called "my position" by philosophers), and bogged down in trivialities. It primarily reflects a dismal failure to solve mid-20th Century problems of semantics. As a popularist ideology, 'scientific philosophy' is now strongly associated with atheist attacks on religions (militant atheists falsely claiming Science in their cause), and with technocratic contempt for traditional moral, social or religious philosophy. Within science, this official 'philosophy' represents a powerful force for conformity, legitimating hostility to heterodox ideas and original thinkers within science, and ridicule of challenging subjects on the borders of science. The crisis in science itself stems intellectually, I believe, from the separation of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of specific sciences to a specialist subject outside the sciences themselves – starting in the late C19th, when Natural Philosophy was replaced by scientific specialisations. (Lord Kelvin, the great polymath C19th scientist, and incidentally a religious man, was Professor of Natural Philosophy through his long career, up to the end of the century: the last of his era.) Subsequently, science has been compartmentalised on an industrial model, akin to a factory production line, with little integration between sciences, and a huge rift between sciences and humanities. Natural scientists today do not think they need any understanding of the philosophy and history of their own subject, and are socialised in their training to be deeply contemptuous of it. This is analogous to a police force being contemptuous of psychology and morality and human understanding, believing their job is simply to apply brute force to enforce their goals. This arrogance leads to mistrust and eventually hatred of the police in the general community, and they end up in the role of a paramilitary force trying to dominate a hostile civilian population. The prominent scientific leaders of today – the propagandists for the scientistic ideology – similarly believe that they have the brute 'scientific force' to override philosophical concerns, having no need to consider 10 conceptual subtleties or heterodox theories or recognise a diversity of ideas. ("When I hear of Schrodinger's cat," says arch-Positivist Stephen Hawking, "I reach for my gun", echoing a notorious Nazi propagandist.) But the conditioning role of philosophical paradigms in science does not disappear just because it is ignored and suppressed from conscious recognition: it is merely unconsciously replaced by simplistic dogmas, acting as doctrines of faith. Principles of conceptual analysis, semantics and epistemology that are routinely taught in core physical sciences of physics and chemistry as scientific philosophy, and saturate the subtext of science textbooks, are based on a startling ignorance of real philosophy. They represent a hopelessly incoherent kludge of the Positivist-Empiricist-Materialist ideology long discredited by serious philosophers. These are presented as foundational doctrines. Critical discussion of philosophical principles and issues is generally out of bounds in university science courses. On the other hand, it is also quite understandable why scientists have become contemptuous of academic philosophy. The separation of 'scientific philosophy' from the scientific disciplines has equally led to its degradation, and it has now become an intellectual fantasy world. Intellectual standards in philosophy, it may be fairly said, are generally dismal. Academic 'philosophers of science' rarely have any working experience or competence as scientists. What they teach appears of no practical use to real scientists. As well as being scientifically incompetent, they also fail to address social issues of science, disdaining life outside their offices in the ivory tower. What do we pay them for? Serious scientists, whatever philosophical naivety they may have, are still generally hard-working teachers and researchers, and rightly contemptuous of such academic drones. López Corredoira thinks the academic philosophy of science is so futile it should be abandoned. I sympathise, but we should recognise that there are some modern philosophers of great ability, and the philosophy of science and of specific sciences has achieved some results of fundamental importance. They are merely buried in the vast academic dross of philosophy. I think philosophy should be transferred back into the sciences proper. Science departments should teach philosophy of science and the philosophy of their own science as part of their core curriculum. Indeed, I think this is the only way academic sciences will be restored to health. But this is unlikely to happen. There is no longer any tradition of philosophy in the natural sciences, and simply no competent academics for such roles. For example, in my central area of interest, there is probably not a single competent philosopher of physics in NZ, in either philosophy or physics departments, across half a dozen traditional universities. And then what about the philosophy of biology, evolution, chemistry, information sciences, social sciences, etc? Where would you find people competent to teach the philosophy of all these subjects in science departments? Such people simply don't exist – certainly not in my country. 11 Anyway, most science professors would strongly oppose this idea. For any realistic course must lead to science students questioning the naïve philosophies of their professors. Far from regarding the vacuum of philosophy in science as a problem, the scientific establishment is intent on destroying philosophy, in an act of intellectual genocide. But I believe that a philosophical dimension of thought, including analysis of fundamental concepts, is critical to doing science – especially to discovery and creation and evaluation of new theories. If you cannot embrace conceptual novelty, you can only become a technician working within a fixed paradigm. This is what the core Science Establishment is now dedicated to. This is a profound change in the culture of science since the heyday of Lorentz, Plank, Curie, Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Dirac, and their colleagues who created modern physics in the early C20th. Science also has a critical role in reflecting back on philosophy – including social, metaphysical and ethical beliefs. A number of sciences profoundly influence our world-view: in particular, the sciences of physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy, biology and evolution, psychology and consciousness, information theory and semantics. Pragmatists and utilitarians may see science as merely a technology factory, producing product technologies, and not care about the 'ultimate truth' of scientific theories. They may care only about the practical use of science to make us richer, more powerful and more comfortable. For them, that is the only reality. But there is far more to it than this. Modern sciences profoundly inform our metaphysical views whether we know it or not. These are our beliefs about fundamental nature of the world and our selves, our meaning and purpose, our origins and fate. Here of course we have the classic modern 'War of World Views'. The 'scientific philosophy' is claimed (by the Scientific Atheists and anti-philosophers) to prove Materialist Reductionism, to deny the existence of a spiritual identity, to make human life an essentially meaningless accident, and morality a subjective delusion. This contradicts traditional religious and philosophical views, which embrace a transcendental reality of spirit or personal identity, and affirms meaning, purpose and morality as intrinsic and real aspects of existence. This has become a bitter divide between the science culture and the humanities. However (although apparently unbeknownst to most scientists), all the major programs in C20th 'scientific philosophy' have dismally failed – and failed to prove any of their metaphysical doctrines – Materialism, Positivism, Reductionism, etc. The characteristic view of the scientistic philosophers is that science is true. Or, since scientific theories sometimes change, that science is usually true, and when it is false it corrects itself, and leads to true theories. But there has always been a chasm between reality and ideology here. After a century of work trying to prove that science is true, the scientistic philosophers have failed to prove any such thing. In fact, it became very evident a long time ago that there is no guarantee, nor 12 indeed even much likelihood, that any general scientific theories of our era are true, and certainly none are complete! This applies particularly to very general and abstract theories, like fundamental theories of physics. This may seem strange: almost everyone who is open to science recognises that science makes progress – and what can this progress be except progress towards truth? What can progress mean except finding true theories? And yet, most scientific theories in the past have proved to be false, and have been abandoned and replaced at a fundamental level. But despite this series of false theories, scientific understanding has clearly progressed. Indeed, many false theories – e.g. Newtonian mechanics and gravity – represent decisive advances in scientific knowledge. But if they are ultimately false, what do they really tell us about the nature of reality? The first part of this book addresses this classic conundrum in the philosophy of science, an issue that also underpins López Corredoira's account. The answer given here is that science really progresses in giving robust explanations. They are robust precisely when they are robust against future theory change. But there is no reason at all to think that our current theories provide us with anything resembling the ultimate truth about the metaphysics of the natural world. This contradicts the claims of scientistic propagandists that science has now irrevocably established the fundamental nature of the world: e.g. that quantum mechanics and General Relativity truly identify the fundamental nature of space and time and matter, with no reasonable doubt possible. This attitude is dismissed here as arrogance, and almost certainly false. But in this attitude we see two powerful destructive drives within modern science. On one hand, the belief that science has reached the ultimate truth about fundamental questions provides the rationale for suppression of heterodox thinkers – those who would question fundamental paradigms of present science (like quantum mechanics or relativity theory or materialist reductionism), who typically have their work suppressed and their careers destroyed by powerful establishment scientists, for the heresy of questioning the truth of science, or scientific authority. And the other hand, we see an insistence by the same establishment scientists – acting as philosophical interpreters of science – on drawing vast metaphysical certainties from shaky scientific theories and superficial reasoning – and treating sceptics about their metaphysical fantasies as anti-scientific heretics. These are two powerful negative syndromes characterising the social and philosophical dimension of modern science. The scientific community cannot blame this on outsiders: it is a form of intellectual fascism engendered from within science. The discussion goes on to consider the wider social context of science. Although 'science' now saturates our culture at many levels, it is in a most peculiar position, as it has been throughout its brief history: it is almost entirely dependant on public funding for its existence. It produces no 13 saleable products. Its only significant commercial product is science education, but that too is dependant on public funding and on a public education system that forces its consumers (mainly school children) to take science courses. Most purchasers of science textbooks are not willing consumers. Barely one percent of adults takes any interest in science – only a small fraction of one percent become 'professional scientists', and most of these are no more than technicians, not research scientists. Science is deeply esoteric to the general public, and completely uninteresting to outsiders in its detail – including scientists from other fields. Of course people do like to see 'science headlines' like the discovery of a new planet, or a new cancer drug, or a new species of hominid – but this is not an interest in science as such, it is an interest in strange and wonderful facts, or in technology that may be personally useful. The shallowness of public interest in science is seen by comparing with other cultural fields. While people today can typically name dozens or hundreds of musicians, actors, writers, artists, sports stars, politicians, and even business personalties, probably few could name more than one modern scientist off the top of their head – Super-Scientist Albert Einstein – with perhaps Stephen Hawking or David Attenborough as the other two widely recognised modern scientists (in the Anglo world at least, where they are TV celebrities). Science in its detail is very esoteric to ordinary people. I think academic scientists do not realise how esoteric it really is. Few adults understand what a single equation in physics means – not even Pythogoras' theorem, although they learned it in school. 'E = mc2' may be widely quoted, but it rolls off most tongues only as a noise: few people have any idea what it means. Few people can cross the abstract divide from arithmetic to algebra, where numbers are replaced by variables – even though everyone is supposed to learn this in high school too. There is a good reason: science is actually a very unnatural, very uninstinctive mode of thought. It is not simply an extension of 'common sense', as Bronowski and other science popularisers have tried to portray. On the contrary, it is distinctly tangential to 'common sense'. It is very abstract, and requires a peculiar discipline of thought: the discipline of formulating explanatory hypotheses and refining explanatory judgements, as well as the peculiar hobby of inventing theoretical entities, and the peculiar behaviour of suppressing emotive reactions to beliefs. Science is a distinctive and peculiar cultural invention, the most recent major cultural institution to develop in Western civilisation. People are interested in results of science – in 'scientific facts' and discoveries – which is to say, in implications of science. But this is quite different to scientific enquiry itself, which means an interest in the nitty-gritty of scientific explanations and evidence. It is like being interested in the content of a program on TV – 'The News' say without any interest in how the TV works – or how The News is produced. And why should we be interested in how the 14 TV works? Most of us are never going to try fix one, or look inside one ourselves. The vast majority of people are likewise never going to do any science themselves. They are never going to use science methods or enquiry to investigate anything. They are never realistically going to exercise independent scientific judgement to evaluate anything. Nonetheless it is important, in a world of propaganda and half-truths, to understand something about how science is produced – just as it is important to understand how The News is produced. I think people are really interested in philosophy rather than science – and science has its human interest only because it informs our philosophical outlook. By philosophy I mean a natural curiosity about the nature of the world; a desire to understand ourselves, our meanings and purposes; extending to an interest in theoretical ideas, and to rational processes behind our beliefs. The natural intellectual genius of the human race is really for the great smorgasbord of philosophy, not the thin gruel of science. It is driven by our need to self-consciously rationalise our own belief systems. We have complex beliefs systems, fraught with fallacies, incomplete knowledge, contradictions, change and instability. We are self-conscious of our own rational processes and beliefs, and there is a huge mental churn required to keep this in order. Although much of this rationalising work no doubt takes place unconsciously, and in dreams, we also consciously obsess about it. People constantly philosophise about their beliefs, discussing judgements of behaviour and morality, puzzling over implications of facts, trying to make sense of discordant information, and so forth. We are trying to understand the meanings of things. This process is partly centred around an intuitive sense of explanation – we want to know why things happen as they do, what their meanings and implications are. But this is not scientific explanation. It is far more intuitive and psychological, calling on agencies and propensities, referring to symbolic meanings and motives and values, making intuitive observations of patterns, triggering off emotive reactions, and so on. The step from this to abstract philosophy, as a systematic rationalisation of ideas, developed independently in many cultures, long before Western Philosophy evolved a branch called 'natural philosophy'. The latter is based on a specific mode of causal explanation that eventually became 'modern science', but it forms only a small part of philosophy as a whole. This 'scientific mode of rationality' cannot possibly replace our general capacity to think philosophically. In this respect, ordinary people are much more philosophically thoughtful and sophisticated than academics typically realise. People are constantly philosophising about the meanings and explanations of things. Not in an academic mode, but in an intuitive way. The radio talk-back host, mulling over topical questions and inviting responses from the public, is philosophising. The worker discussing frustrations of dealing with management, and trying to decide how to respond to the system, is 15 philosophising. Academic philosophy, at the level of mediocrity generally taught to undergraduates, destroys rather than enhances people's intuitive abilities to think about meaningful philosophical questions. On the other hand, people are much less scientific than scientists expect – including most academics and professionals. Very few people, including few science graduates, can make meaningful independent scientific judgements on their own. It is not because of a lack of intelligence: it is because science is counter-intuitive, it draws on a very complex web of background beliefs, and it requires a very specific mental discipline. As a result, 'scientific belief' among science students as much as ordinary people is overwhelmingly based on authority, not on evidence (as claimed by scientistic propagandists). Indeed, the most valuable talent in a world awash with false information and propaganda is to be able to identify the reliability of sources of information – and modern science is now full of propaganda to convince us that science is the only reliable source. This is rationalised by the idea that scientists themselves base their beliefs directly on explicit evidence, but this is entirely a myth. Scientists base their beliefs overwhelmingly on what they read in textbooks – trusting that the textbook is based on evidence somewhere down the line. When the line breaks down, as it has today, science too is degraded to dogma. We are urged to trust science, but when there is a scientific controversy, whose science do we trust? The 'science' with the best propaganda. Science is a faith-based discipline, embodying faith in the (Text) Book and the High Priest ('expert opinion'). Exercising your own independent judgement in a scientific discipline will get you in big trouble if it conflicts with Scientific Authority. The meaningful aspect of science does not lie in its empirical data as such, but in its power to inform our personal systems of beliefs, or philosophy. The modern scientistic propagandists, preaching a MaterialistAtheistic ideology, exploit this philosophical dimension of interest in the same way as religious demagogues, just with a different aim: the aim of destroying belief in meaning. In fact, most individual sciences per se, as specialised enquiries, have no intrinsic human interest at all. This reflects the very peculiar position of science as the subject almost no one is actually interested in. Music, literature, drama and art are all creative intellectual activities too: but they can all support themselves, at least partially, in a capitalist world, by selling their products. This is because people like them. Pure science cannot support itself commercially from its products at all. Its products are scientific theories, observational data, and explanations – and there is no popular or commercial market at all for scientific theories, for scientific knowledge, as such. (Just try to sell a scientific theory to someone! "How would you like to buy my theory that: T = 2ħ2/memp2Gc? Isn't that lovely? No? Not even a dollar? Oh why not? You don't have any use for it?") There is no market outside the circles of other scientists – and scientists cannot pay for science simply by buying it off each other in a circular economy. 16 Iconic modern science projects – like the LHC, the Hubble telescope, the Apollo missions – are of course vastly too expensive to be possible except as large national or international projects. But even small-scale, routine laboratory-type science has become an expensive activity, and the cost of pure science in most fields today is beyond anyone not funded by governments or corporates. 'Independent scientists' who typically work as consultants generally make their incomes from routine commercial science – gathering and analysing information of specific commercial interest to some business. Such work uses scientific technology and methods, but it is usually of no scientific interest as such: only of short-term practical interest, as specific information. (In fact, if you do discover something of genuine scientific interest in the course of such work, it is unlikely your employer will have any interest in it. It is more likely to make the project manager angry that you have gone 'off task': for they are only interested in what they have commissioned you to report on.) Thus pure science is in a very awkward position in our society economically, and it has no natural place among more traditional activities and professions. Professional science as we know it is a very recent – by far the most recent generic profession. There have been doctors and lawyers, engineers and architects, mathematicians and accountants, bureaucrats and planners, merchants and bankers, philosophers and priests, soldiers and sailors, artists and musicians, prostitutes and tax collectors, across many millennia and many civilisations. But natural science has barely existed for 400 years in the West, and is only about a hundred years old as a professional career path for significant numbers of people. It appeared only sporadically in other cultures before that and only as an anomaly, an expression of a certain rare and eccentric personality. It remains the natural vocation of only a rare type of personality. Until the later C19th, science was very much a self-appointed vocation, largely restricted to hobbyists with independent means, and a few independent researchers who could find wealthy patrons. The modern organisation of specialist sciences in professionally-taught university faculties only emerged in the later C19th. For the first few decades of the C20th, science was limited in scope, and survived on a relative pittance compared to the vast budgets of today. It was really only when physics became a critical prop for military technology, with the nuclear arms race, and subsequently a nationalist competition in the cold-war space race, that science started getting the huge levels of public funding it enjoys today. In the same era, politicians began to recognise the value of science as the foundation for advanced technology, and realised that public investment in science would pay off economically down the line – although it might be ten or twenty or thirty years later. Commercial economics has no place for projects of such 17 long-term value – it is based on short-term values, trading of goods with immediate demand. So science does not fit within the natural categories of the commercial world, or capitalist economics, where profit from sales of products and services is the driving value for an enterprise. Yet it has been forced to fit, because capitalist economics is the overwhelming principle of modern social organisation. But the true value of pure scientific knowledge is impossible to measure economically. It is both ephemeral, and uncertain, and largely belongs to the future. A symptom of this is an artificial construct of value and productivity within modern science. 'Scientific productivity' is measured by a surrogate: numbers of peer-reviewed papers published. Science has consequently become a competition to publish as many papers as possible (with something like one and a half million peer reviewed papers published per year – and presently doubling about every 15 years – which implies some ten million unpublished papers submitted per year, to about 25,000 officially indexed peer-reviewed journals – a number also steadily expanding ). Yet most published papers have no apparent value – about 90% are never referenced again – while a tiny number have a large impact, with hundreds of citations . This peer-reviewedpaper-productivity measure, despite its huge distortions of scientific value, has been the fundamental organising principle for the scientific-academic bureaucracy for decades now. It has led to a serious crisis of quality and to manipulative power-politics. The failure of peer review is now recognised as a major crisis in science, and a lot of recent material has appeared on this issue. López Corredoira also has an interesting discussion of this. In Part 2, I put forward a series of examples from my own work, from some 15 years ago, that illustrates the severe lack of objectivity and the abuse of peer reviews in the game of academic power politics. These examples are also chosen to illustrate the themes addressed in the Part 1: the powerful role of metaphysical paradigms in science, projected as ideological contests. The examples I give here concern the metaphysics of time in modern physics, and attempts to suppress realism about time flow. Following López Corredoira, I also propose a reformation of the system of journal publications, to address the problem of bias and manipulation by reviewers. Another major feature of modern science is the pressure on pure science (producing knowledge of intangible value, with no capitalist measure) to become technology science (producing tangible products). Today, corporates as well as governments fund extensive 'scientific research and development', primarily aimed at product technology. Of course there must be a domain for this kind of applied science. But nowadays, 'pure science research' is rarely done without also being motivated by potential product opportunities. As such, this research activity loses the primary intellectual values that drive 18 pure science. The spirit of science dies. My own country, a second-world scientific nation, provides a dismal example of this corruption of science to profit-making commercialism, with the conversion of public scientific institutes to business enterprises, under the spell of a neo-liberal capitalist ideology. Pure science research institutes in New Zealand were converted in the 1990s to 'CRIs' – crown research institutes – specifically tasked with making profits. The scientific value of their subsequent work appears to have diminished to practically zero. In fact, I think they now have a negative value, stifling private competition from outside the Government sector, and suppressing the function of providing public-good science, in favour of trying to establish their own competitive advantage. Their performance is so poor that senior academics and independent scientists now repeatedly call for various CRIs to be disbanded. The ongoing pretence of having scientific institutions is more harmful than having nothing, as well as more expensive. These institutions have proved impossible to reform. If we want a science sector in NZ, it must be started again from scratch. Science of course has now become a key Public Institution in our society, with huge public funding and infrastructure. It has developed a mythological status, being treated as a kind of god: an official Oracle that society calls on to answer certain kinds of questions. "Scientists say that ..." is the stock phrase in news bulletins when reassurance of objective knowledge is needed. But there is increasing popular doubt about its reliability, effectiveness and value. One telling sign is that where science in the past had this largely unchallenged role of Oracle, of representing scientific conformity, of answering controversial questions with authoritative evidence, we now see conformity breaking down, and science impotent to resolve numerous controversies. It now provides little intellectual leadership on difficult topics. This is an inevitable result of its degradation into mediocrity. The authority of Science as Oracle has diminished most among the most highly educated classes, with well-informed people today routinely sceptical and cynical of 'scientific experts'. They appear as just more talking heads on TV, with a message to sell from their respective institutions. We know now that 'scientific facts' frequently change, just like 'legal facts', and 'scientific conclusions' depend on who the scientists are – which side of a debate they are on, which industry they work for. There are also many people today, well-informed without being scientists, with intense personal interests in niche subjects – ranging from health to energy to farming and genetic engineering to UFOs and parapsychology – who have grown contemptuous of the views of the 'Scientific Establishment' in their own areas of special interest. Such 'amateurs' who question scientific orthodoxy are dismissed as cranks by academic scientists; but their weight of numbers grows; and 'professional science' is often proved incompetent in such areas – and prone 19 to corruption when commercial profit is involved. What should be even more alarming to the Scientific Establishment, many of the best creative and original professional scientists feel the same way about their scientific colleagues too. The best heterodox scientists often see the Establishment scientists (who typically attack their new ideas) as dull, mediocre, conformist and dogmatic. The best creative scientists do not trust the bastions of modern science either! There is no doubt that thousands of the most creative young students, who would have become the premier scientists in an earlier age, have withdrawn from science in recent decades, because they find its culture so stifling and conformist. Thus we see the authority and prestige of science under threat on multiple fronts. Science – or a scientific methodology – is also supposed to be applied within the business functions of corporates and bureaucracies – tasked as they are with critical planning and research functions. This is a joke. And not the funny kind of joke. The death of science is nowhere more evident than in the research, analysis and planning functions of government departments. Here we find 'science' reduced to its utterly lowest quality – where it is no longer recognisable as science at all. In Part 3 I illustrate this, again with examples from personal experience. In the NZ Ministry of Education I observed 'education research' reduced to a state of farce, a farce perpetuated decade after decade. There is nothing unique about this example: this failure is universal across government bureaucracies. These also act as public Oracles, controlling official information and peddling government propaganda, as well as controlling state funding of wider research communities. They dominate every sector of society – education, justice, health, science, environment, welfare, finance, business, transport, housing, farming, security, defence; every major institution in every developed country is under the control of such monolithic government departments. Their scientific capability can only be described as farcical. Here we find the death sentence on science completed. If the future success and survival of our society and civilisation is dependant on the scientific competence of government institutions, we are doomed. I also try to relate these syndromes to the socio-psycho dynamics of these institutions. Why are such bureaucracies such dismal failures? It is not just one or two, but all of them, practically without exception. It is not just a phenomenon in New Zealand: similar complaints about incompetence, malevolence, and invasive encroachment of public bureaucracies on personal lives seem to be heard from most developed countries. And it is not just government departments: large corporate bureaucracies may not be quite as hopelessly incompetent as government departments, but they are similarly fraught with bureaucracy and ham-strung by intellectual mediocrity. The banking and finance sector, for example, is an intellectual vacuum at the highest executive level, and completely incapable of addressing the systemic 20 problems of the global financial system. Of course its executives don't care as long as they continue to make vast fortunes. I attempt to identify some core mechanisms at work here. One is to relate the hierarchical power structures that define these organisations as cultural ecologies, to the characteristic adaptive behaviours of their members. The power-roles defining the power hierarchies are the definitive common feature of all such organisations. I argue that these power structures are instinctively exploited by power cliques of management, working for their own ends. The dynamics of competition in the environment they have designed for themselves inevitably leads to the degradation of these organisations, through a severe degradation of talent. They are doomed to failure by the mediocrity and exploitative attitudes of their management. A second theme is the dominance of a specific cultural paradigm, reflecting a certain kind of shared social metaphysics characterising our age. This is an intense drive to a rule-based model of social behaviour. This rule-based mentality is not new: it is seen throughout the long history of institutional tyranny, from the Spanish Inquisition to Nazi Germany. It is a characteristic of a distinctively fascist vision of morality that many people seem preconditioned to adopt. It has always been the dream of politicians, moralists and bureaucrats to have centralised control of people's behaviour in total detail; the world of Orwell's 1984. In the past this was prevented by natural technological limitations; but it has taken on a new virulence today, empowered by the use of computerised information-and-decision-making technology, to exhaustively encode rules of behaviour, and to monitor and control behaviour, and administer punishments. I note that the same rulebased metaphysics underpins a number of distinctive modern scientific paradigms: those that characterise the new tyrannies within science. Scientific institutions have been overtaken by the same general syndrome as public bureaucracies – forced on them by the bureaucratic masters who fund and control them. They are obsessed with 'management processes' and 'business models' and 'methodological rules' and neo-liberal commercial reforms – obsessions destructive of the pursuit of science. The creative individual at the heart of the scientific enterprise has been trampled to death in this managerial scrum. "But Modern Business Science shows that this is the only rational way to organise large-scale enterprises!" the neo-liberal management scientist tells us. "We must control and measure our Inputs and Outputs and use our economic theory to Optimise Outcomes!" In their vision, scientists are "Inputs" to an industrial machine, just as factory workers are "Inputs" to an industrial machine – a raw resource just like other material resources. Human capital is interchangeable and replaceable, productivity has a one-dimensional measure, value is reduced to money, and the System runs by pre-defined Rules imposed by executive decision-makers. 21 The first thing these neo-liberal business executives fail to recognise is that they themselves and their peers – the managerial elite and the 'business scientist' gurus – are actually the most mediocre and incompetent, relative to their roles, among all the worker hierarchies, and setting themselves in charge of such organisations dooms them to failure from the start. In any case, although this industrial-type business model succeeds up to a point in massproduction factories (albeit denigrating the conditions of the enslaved human work force), it simply does not work at all in science. Science has no paintby-numbers rule-based methodology. It cannot be automated by business process. It cannot be done by people who do not have a creative scientific intellectual drive. The institutionalised model of science cannot identify genuine scientific talent, cannot give it the creative freedom to work, and cannot retain it. This raises the question of whether there is a practical prospect of rejuvenating science in its current forms. Should we try to save the failing institutions of modern science? Of course the Establishment assumes that we must keep fiddling with reforms to preserve their System. The System is their God. They would be children lost in the wilderness without it. But I believe it is too late to save this bureaucratised incarnation of science, and futile to keep supporting its failed institutions. It should be allowed to die. I believe it is time to allow our corrupted science industry to collapse, as a bankrupt institution, and trust the scientific spirit – by which I mean the spirit of natural philosophy rather than that of scientific technology – rejuvenates real science anew. Science will one day be resurrected, at a grass-roots level, through the efforts of those with a natural vocation to be scientists. But the time has come when real scientists should now abandon our failed scientific institutions, cease supporting the bureaucratic tyranny that sweeps across our world, cease working as technology slaves for state-corporate management; and find new places to work, new roles to define themselves, and new ways to fulfil their natural vocation. Creative scientists were once called natural philosophers, and sought a deeper understanding of nature and our place in it, in an integrated view combining the technical sciences and the social sciences, metaphysics and social morality. This quest for understanding has been destroyed in the modern era of science. I think it is time to reinvent that occupation, and for real scientists to return to that role once again. In the last part of this book I make some comments about the challenges for independent scientists, who wish to withdraw from the present system, and work instead for a future resurrection of science. However this book is not about the resurrection of science, but about its death. The final part of this book is a set of Appendices, containing exhibits to illustrate certain key points. These contain technical detail that goes beyond 22 the style of the main text. They correspond to specific points made in the main text. I briefly explain the rationale for these.  Appendix 1 is an extract from a brilliant monograph of philosophical observations about physics by the great pioneering particle physicist, T.D. Lee, in 1988, made not in the tradition of academic philosophy of science, but by applying his natural intuition. He makes many lucid observations. Relates to the example of time reversal and time symmetry in Part 2, and to the value of genuine philosophical reflection within science.  Appendix 2 is an extract from an article by Einstein, in 1920, 'The Aether and Relativity'. Einstein in his mature years took the concept of an Aether seriously, and even affirms its reality in a certain sense in the context of the General Theory of Relativity – contrary to popularist ridicule of the concept in physics. Relates to the example of the Ether in Part 1, and temporal metaphysics in Part 2.  Appendix 3 gives some technical background to the issue of time reversibility of quantum mechanics, relating to the first peer review example in Part 2. Requires basic quantum mechanics.  Appendix 4 illustrates what is meant by a realist semantic interpretation, illustrated first with the example of Pythagoras' theorem, and then with the metric equation of Special Relativity. This is for scientists who are mystified by what philosophers mean by 'semantic analysis'. Relates to the case in Part 1 for realist philosophical analysis to be taught in science.  Appendix 5 goes a step further into logic, and presents an important proof in semantics, a reductio ad absurdum of the core Positivist principle of meaning. This is to illustrate that technical philosophy is a real subject, with analysis backed by formal techniques of proof.  Appendix 6 goes another step again, and presents core concepts of possible world semantics, illustrating the real metaphysical dimension of debates over foundational concepts of science. Metaphysics is encapsulated in the construction of the logical space, required for the formal representation of concepts. Scientific theories implicitly postulate theories of the logical space.  Appendix 7 presents various extracts on the Alvarez controversy, over the astroid-impact theory of the extinction of dinosaurs. This is a classic illustration of how scientific debates are often fraught with controversy and spite. Relates to example of explanations in Part 1, illustrating that evidence for well-accepted explanations is not necessarily straightforward.  Appendix 8 provides material on the evolution of peer review, illustrating the open review system, and giving a further example of 23 conflicting peer reviews about an interesting heterodox theory in physics.  Appendix 9 provides material on the recent phenomenon of 'predatory publishers', and issues about the commercial corruption of the scientific and academic journal industry.  Appendix 10 provides further material on the evolution of the academic journal industry, and the trend to open access journals.  Appendix 11 provides material on a new system or surveillance on researchers, imposed through a universal identification scheme called ORCID. This prevents independent researchers, without approved institutional affiliations (with academic, government or corporate institutions) from even submitting scientific papers.  Appendix 12 is an extract from NZ writer Nicky Hager's 2002 book Seeds of Distrust, about a notorious incident of political manipulation of science in NZ. A model of investigative reporting into political corruption of science, containing many insightful observations.  Appendix 13 presents arch-heretic Rupert Sheldrake's Ten Dogmas of Science, and the virulent personal attacks on him, started by Sir John Maddox, the arch-conservative editor of Nature, and continued by many other scientistic propagandists from sceptic and debunker groups. 24 PART 1. THE TWILIGHT OF SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY. López Corredoira's perspective. López Corredoira sees a corruption of science in a larger framework, as part of a more general degradation inherent in modern society: a loss of individuality and humanity to the gods of money and power, bureaucracy and institutionalisation. I begin with an extended quote that sets the general framework for his point of view. "In general one has the impression when reading about the history of civilization that human beings were behind the dynamics of the societies... Nowadays, however, one has the impression that individuals are just simple marionettes whose strings are pulled by some abstract and superior entity. I am not talking about the Christian god but about that almighty god of modern capitalist times: money. Money is the great boss of our society. It governs the decisions of individuals and has much more power than the different nation-states or other human organizations... [I am talking about] the generation of structures in our society which have become automatic in some sense, and thus have become selfsustaining autonomous structures. Once implemented, they may work independently of the will of human individuals. The economy, our present financial system, appears in my opinion as the most important of the autonomous structures to have emerged in our civilization. A monster, Frankenstein's Creature, which once created, emancipates itself from its creators and turn against the interests of individuals, pushing them to slavery. We could live in a society in which individuals worked much less than they do now, but capital and its interest in unstoppable growth, pushes individuals to produce more and more, far beyond their needs. People ask for more and more work in a time when the work force is more dispensable than ever, given the high industrialization of our society; an absurd situation according to some thinkers, including myself. We are destroying our environment; our towns are becoming uglier and uglier, with so many factories, cars, concrete, etc.; our forest, seas, rivers, etc., are becoming contaminated; but we cannot stop the advance of the destruction because money pushes people to follow the career path of progress, technology and destruction, and few people want to be outside that system, few people want to live without money in their pockets. In my opinion, knowledge has become another autonomous structure within our society, although it is less important than money. In this new system of gods, money will be like Zeus, the major god, while the rest of the autonomous structures will be minor gods, depending always on the great god of money. Indeed, we must recognize that most of the people 25 working as scientists in our society regard their research as a job, in order to earn a salary, and in most of the cases the obtaining of that salary and its associated status are the only things which keep them in their boring and passionless research fields. (p.101-102). What makes López Corredoira's critique most interesting and valuable is that he brings this large claim to life by exploring its details through illustrations from the real practice of science, giving a psycho-social account of how individuals respond to the cultural framework imposed on them. The framework is fixed by the larger 'autonomous structures' of bureaucracy, hierarchical power and money that govern the organisation of science, as they govern all modern social institutions. But the modern scientific bureaucracy is implemented in its detail by the adaptive behaviour of individual scientists, locked in a struggle for careers. The result is the triumph of mediocrity and self-serving pettiness in the social elite, with the genuine creative heterodox thinkers, who created science in the first place, being driven from the field. Over the last half-century or so, orthodox scientific institutions have increasingly been left in the hands of a feudal mafia of power-hungry gate-keepers, a controlling conformist mediocrity of incompetent researchers. Yes: evolving exactly into the form of a government bureaucracy or capitalist corporation. The result is tyranny. "The evolution of science towards a tyranny of knowledge is unavoidable, because of the logic of the construction of knowledge itself, both because the knowledge is becoming more and more solid, and also because the dominant groups within the dominant ideas in science are becoming more and more powerful. The distinction between power and truth in science is difficult. p.117 López Corredoira emphasises the confusion of truth with power, and the gulf between the perception and the reality of success. Although science has descended into failure over the preceding decades, scientific institutions have become far more powerful, fuelled by perceptions of success controlled through media propaganda. "The point is that there are strong economical interests surrounding the business of science, and the publicity in the mass media is used to create the illusion of great science, supported by huge investments of public money. The spirit of science is already in decline, close to death; but the body of science, the hierarchy around the business of research, is still very much alive and will not decline simply because of a lack of interesting results. P.97. 26 He laments the corresponding degradation of science to technical specialisations, tasked with gathering information, but lacking any kind of wisdom. This reflects the business model of an industrial production line imposed on science. "Scientists have been specializing for quite a long time, but it is now a question of micro-specialization... It is a case of converting the scientific process into an industrialized mass-production system. p.103. "Science has abandoned wisdom and become a mere technical profession. It is supposed that humanity has become wiser because of the greater amount of knowledge gained, but it is not so. In general, scientists and philosophers in the past were much wiser, even with less knowledge. p.104. Despite his outspoken criticism of scientific institutions, he is a scientific traditionalist at heart, with tolerant but relatively conservative views about what science means. He speaks for the value of science, and believes it is the proper method to real knowledge about the natural world. "Scientific knowledge is something good; I think I have expressed this idea with sufficient clarity in Chapter 2. But anything in excess is bad. Water is good for living beings, but an excess of water drowns them. ... Science is not being eroded by the limits of knowledge but by unlimited knowledge. Certainly, there is a limit to the number of really interesting questions that can be answered, a limit which we have already surpassed, but society will not stop its activity just because of that limit; rather, I think society will stop the obsessive collection of knowledge when it feels lost among the information, when it gets fed up with getting drunk after so many science parties, when it falls down exhausted and wonders whether we are servants of the structures we have created or we control them, whether man was made for science or science made for man, as Unamuno said. p.105. He is careful to contrast his position with simple anti-science views: "A more aggressive attack on present-day science comes from some authors who talk not only about the end of science but also about whether we should do anything to save it because of the way it has behaved in the last few decades (e.g., Oblomoff, Ségalat). p.100. "In my opinion, science is still of great value and should not be confused with present-day scientific institutions, in the same sense that religion should not be confused with the church. I think we must not level the 27 charge against science but against the capitalist system which currently supports it. P.100. Here he conforms to a popular sentiment among scientists themselves. There is an outpouring of criticism by scientists of all walks against the bureaucratisation of their culture. This general phenomenon can probably be traced back to the cold war and the rise of corporate capitalism in the US. Following the Second World War, scientific institutions in the US became dominated by the twin organisational model of corporate elitism and government bureaucracy. Their elite bureaucrats fulfilled the Capitalist vision of science as a technology factory, providing slaves for the military-industrial estate. It is obvious to everyone engaged in real science that this capitalist business model for scientific organisation does not work. I will come back to this question at the end of this study: what should or could our response be to the corruption and degradation of science? Should we try to 'fix' or 'save' its failed institutions? Or as more radical critics hold, should we leave it behind, as we left the political institutions of feudal aristocracy behind, and find a new way? But before approaching that essentially political question, I review López Corredoira's views, and give some pertinent examples of my own, both in support, and in some cases in contrast. 28 Heterodoxy and orthodoxy. López Corredoira recognises the key, traditional goal of scientific research is the exploration of new knowledge, and the key problem lies in making judgements of the quality of novel ideas, in fields with apparently diminishing returns. What new research should be funded and supported? What new ideas should be investigated? The research enterprise itself depends on the potential for new or revolutionary ideas to be found. But as time goes on, the most obvious veins of research are explored, and new ideas are harder to come by. It is a bit like a gold mine. The first prospectors strike it rich and find nuggets in easy reach; but when the first strikes have been panned, you need to switch to industrialised methods to extract what is left. And when there is no gold in the ground left to find at all, it doesn't matter how big you make your industrial gold mine, you will only find microscopic grains. The spirit of gold mining changes too. The first prospectors are individualists, exploring new frontiers. The first gold miners are adventurers, prepared to undertake hazardous journeys with serious risks and endure harsh conditions. They are individualists, and entrepreneurs, working for themselves. Later the mine becomes an industrialised factory, run by production-line wage-workers, requiring expensive heavy equipment, needing large capital investment, with the enterprise and the profits controlled by executives and accountants from comfortable offices. Gold miners are always keen to determine if there is likely to be gold in a certain piece of ground. But scientists have no way of telling if there is any scientific gold to find in a certain area or not. In this respect, scientific discovery – the process of finding ideas, theories, concepts, possibilities is not a part of the 'scientific method'. Orthodox philosophy of science (positivism, empiricism, Popperianism, etc), which proclaims the triumph of the 'empirical method', says nothing about the creation of scientific ideas – or the pre-scientific judgement of the quality of new ideas. The conventional account of the 'scientific method' is an arm-chair rationalisation, designed to justify scientific knowledge. It is primarily a banal account of a method to test a given empirical hypothesis. But it assumes hypotheses, theories, ideas, are given: plucked out of thin air. This is where the 'scientific method' has a yawning chasm: it has no method for either the creation of ideas, or for the judgement of value . Given that science has the task of extending knowledge (rather than just accumulating more facts to support present theories), then science must explore new ideas. Genuinely new ideas are notoriously difficult to judge – and impossible to judge for the vast majority of 'scientific technicians' churned out of our academic institutions. For new ideas, by their very nature, are discovered by scientists with rare talents and by rare accidents. They are ideas 29 hiding behind the facades of conventional paradigms, hiding in the gaps of the textbook explanations and exam exercises that define 'scientific reality' for academics. They require novel thoughts, concepts, models, formalisms and solutions. Ordinary science students struggle to understand and recite even the conventional text-book problems that have been solved for them. If they cannot verify even these by themselves without following and trusting a textbook, they have no capacity at all to make judgements of new solutions at the forefront of their field. How many scientists mature from the state of science students to develop any kind of mature scientific judgement, when confronted with novelty? The answer is obvious enough from history and experience: very few. The present scientific ideology and mediocrity that dominates scientific institutions often reduces this to: none. I think most NZ science institutions actually have no scientists capable of making meaningful judgements of novel scientific ideas. López Corredoira laments that the mediocrity of modern science – built into the logic of its modern mass-production culture – swamps out genuinely new, ambitious, or 'revolutionary' ideas, when they do appear, in favour of safe, trivial, pointless research projects, based on old and failed ideas. He gives the following hilariously sarcastic image. "There are many naïve persons, scientists or non-scientists, around the world who still believe that science is an open process in which the best ideas are quickly recognized and accepted, while the wrong ideas are immediately discarded. This kind of individual thinks that achievement in science nowadays depends on intelligence, on genius. They think that someone could be working hard in a laboratory, or developing some theoretical idea and, if they were to make a revolutionary discovery, they would open the door of the room in which they was cloistered and shout along the corridors "Eureka! Eureka!"; then, colleagues would approach and say: "Have you made a revolutionary discovery? Come in! Come in! We were waiting for you ..." and the genius would have the chance to show their new discoveries and their colleagues would open their mouths, surprised by the new idea, recognizing its merit, and carrying the genius on their shoulders while shouting "Torero, torero,...!" ("Bullfighter" in Spanish). This was never the way in which general ideas were accepted. p.108. "The reality is that nobody is waiting for revolutionary ideas, they are not welcome, now less than ever, and the difficulties that professional researchers have when they want to challenge dominant ideas (e.g., Campanario & Martin) are enough to dissuade them in their enterprise or cause to be rejected as outsiders by the system. p.111. 30 The same point has been reiterated over and again in recent times by many original scientists – including Nobel laureates who have made significant breakthrough discoveries. Many testify to being attacked and excluded by their colleagues, for years or decades, precisely for being original and challenging. It is not so surprising, for at the end of the day, they are competing with their orthodox academic colleagues. Academics are notoriously ruthless when their self-interest and self-image is at stake. This is precisely what it means for science to adopt a corporate bureaucratic culture. Corporate executives and government bureaucrats are the model of ruthlessness in defending their self-interest – pragmatism overrides truth and the institutionalisation of academics in a corporate culture produces the same result. This distinction between the thankless mission of developing new and challenging or revolutionary ideas, and the often pointless but well-funded grind of the routine science industry, is a crux of the problem. On one hand, López Corredoira is somewhat conservative, in expressing scepticism that there are many 'revolutionary ideas' out there to find. He suspects that, like an exhausted gold field, much of our significant scientific knowledge has already been found. In this respect, research science is in a death-spiral, devoting more and more resources to find more and more trivial knowledge, and leaving behind a growing slag-heap of useless information, like the vast charnels of consumerist waste our society cranks out in a hopeless quest to improve the quality of life through consumption instead of recognising that there are natural limits to consumption, and coming to terms with the meaning of what we have. On this point I will disagree somewhat though: I think there is far more real scientific knowledge to discover – indeed, that our scientific world view will undergo a dramatic transformation before it discerns what the world of nature really encompasses. I will return to this. On the other hand, he recognises that insofar as there are really new or revolutionary discoveries to be made, modern science suppresses real attempts to develop significant knowledge. He presents this with a contrast between 'orthodox' with 'heterodox' science. "Science is not a direct means for reaching the truth. Science works with hypotheses rather than with truths. This fact, although recognized, is usually forgotten. It gives rise to the creation of certain key groups within science which think that their hypotheses are indubitably solid truths, and think that the hypotheses of other minority groups are just extravagant or crackpot ideas. These are usually referred to as the orthodox and heterodox positions in a given field. p.107. "On the one hand, heterodox scientists are possessed by a feeling of being an unappreciated genius, have too much "ego", normally working alone/individually or in very small groups, creative, intelligent, non31 conformist. A vast majority of them are men. Their dream is to create a new paradigm in science, something which completely changes our view of the field of science in which they are working. For instance, there are many of them who are trying to show that Einstein was wrong, maybe because he is the symbol of genius and defeating his theory would mean that they are greater than Einstein. Most of them are crackpots. On the other hand, orthodox scientists, who constitute the majority of the community, are dominated by groupthink and snowball effect, following a leader's opinion as in the story of the emperor's new clothes, are good workers performing monotonous tasks without ideas of their own in large groups, are specialists in a small field which they know very well, conformist, domestic. Their dream is to get a permanent position at a university or research centre, to be the leader of a project, to be a recognized science administrator. Most of them are like sheep, some of them with the vocation of shepherds as well. Luminet compares these people doing "normal science" to craftsmen, and compares those scientists who pursue a revolutionary science to imaginative artists. p. 109 – 110. López Corredoira's description here is something of a stereotype, and he does not tell us what 'crackpots' are. However, there is some basic truth in this description of heterodoxy and orthodoxy within science. In ordinary life, people come with a spectrum of orthodox and heterodox beliefs and impulses there is no simple distinction of personality types on this basis (although openness is one major psychological trait, it interacts with half a dozen other major traits). But in the community of science a clear and critical distinction has formed: a great divide between 'us' (the professional scientists: people with titles and offices) and 'them' (the ignorant public, including amateur 'crackpots'). It echoes throughout the rhetoric of scientific propagandists attacking heterodox thinkers. ("Sheldrake is not a scientist, he is a crackpot, a pseudo scientist, any real scientist will tell you that his ideas are scientific nonsense..."). In their private beliefs, not all orthodox scientists are so prejudiced; but for those with official power roles, things are indeed very black and white. Scientific culture forces conformity, designed to make an orthodox 'class solidarity' the norm, and heterodoxy and creative individuality the enemy. Conformity takes comfort in a shared mediocrity. There is also deeper kind of personality trait related to the difference between science as an exploratory activity of discovery, and science as an academic activity of mastering a domain of pre-existing knowledge. It is parallel to the difference between explorers and tourists. Both are travellers, and there are lots of people today for whom 'travel' is a major hobby. But most of us travel as tourists, visiting places and cultures that are novel and exciting to us personally, but are actually well-known, thoroughly explored, and essentially safe. Travelling to experience other cultures is a good thing to do, but it is 32 quite different to the traditional role of explorers: visiting unknown and dangerous lands, driven by an excitement of discovering new and unexplored frontiers. The real explorers in history typically endured great hardship and real danger. But the age of the intrepid explorer is essentially over on the Earth's surface, because it has been systematically explored. Nowadays, travelling has become the popular middle-class hobby of tourism. And few modern tourists would have been explorers in the old days. Conversely, few genuine explorers are interested in tourism. They seek other challenges. There is really no role left for true explorers, in the geographical sense. Their age has gone. I think the scenario painted in the Twilight of Science is analogous to this. Science is seen as having already explored most of the dangerous and exciting places. Scope for new discoveries is increasingly limited for modern scientists, and most are now professional 'scientific experts', tourist guides through textbooks who take their pride in mastering existing knowledge. The spirit of science has changed in the process, and this makes science unattractive for the explorers: the people wired for novelty and discovery, and typically some kind of heroic individuality. Thus science changes its nature when it has been fully explored, and scientists of the present age are now quite unlike the explorers of the past in spirit. The scientific culture changes its fundamental values when it becomes dominated by this different type of personality, just as frontier outposts change their personality when they become settlements, and then towns, and then urban environments. In the first phase of 'civilisation', the original jungle or prairie is rendered into farms by pioneers – those able to tame nature from its raw and untamed state. In the next phase, the farms are taken off the pioneers by carpetbaggers, lawyers and bankers – those able to dominate the system of legal ownership. And then the whole environment is subsequently incorporated into the estates of the wealthy and powerful: who have learned how to dominate the entire social jungle. Colonial towns often retain a sentimental nostalgia celebrating the deeds of the pioneers: but this is a false image, designed for a sense of social solidarity, and themes for tourist attractions. López Corredoira illustrates how this cultural shaping in modern corporatised science works, through a number of concepts, such as the snowball effect, groupthink, supervedettes. "The snowball effect ... is a feedback loop: the more successful a line of research is, the more money and scientists are dedicated to working on it, and the greater the number of experiments on observations that can be explained ad hoc, such as in Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy; this leads to the theory being considered more successful. In some cases, the system supports conservative views, but there are also cases of speculative lines of 33 research that have been converted into large enterprises. For instance, in theoretical physics, string theory has absorbed a lot of people and funds, as well as marginalizing and deprecating other approaches... p.85-86. Groupthink is a widely recognised phenomenon in social psychology: "In a sociological analysis, Janis categorizes the symptoms of groupthink as: 1) An illusion of invulnerability, shared by most or all the members, which creates excessive optimum and encourages the taking of extreme risks. 2) An unquestioned belief in the group's inherent morality, allowing the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions. 3) Collective efforts at rationalization in order to discount warnings or other information that might lead the members to reconsider their assumptions before they recommit themselves to their past policy decisions. 4) Stereotyped views of enemy leaders as too deviant to warrant genuine attempts to negotiate, or as too weak and stupid to counter risky attempts made at defeating their purposes. 4) Self-censorship of deviations from the apparent group consensus, reflecting each member's inclination to minimize to himself the importance of his doubts and counterarguments. 5) A shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view (partly resulting from self-censorship of deviations, augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent). 6) Direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group's stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, making clear that this type of dissent is contrary to what is expected of all loyal members. 7) The emergence of selfappointed mindguards-members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions (Dolsenhe). P. 110. These are essentially mechanisms of adaptive cultural evolution. They show how personality traits are shaped to sustain a cultural environment in a selfsupporting feed-back loop. In fact there is an obvious adaptive evolution at work in institutions that everyone knows. People have different natural personality types, and institutional structure reflects this. There is a distinct sub-set with a primary will to power, who seek powerful positions and status, and become managers and executives. They intrinsically understand each others' motivations as egocentric, which is why they can form a coherent power elite. Those with a primary intellectual drive seeking interesting intellectual challenges – challenges of exploration and discovery become researchers or technologists. They intrinsically understand each other's motivations as creative performance. The latter have no social power and the former have no intellectual vision. 34 As workers in bureaucracies often say: anyone who wants to be the manager should be disqualified for that reason. Managers are the people who wave their hands furiously when a position of authority is in the offering, saying: Pick me! Pick me! I'm no good at technical stuff, my talent is for making decisions! I am a natural leader! This of course reflects the concept of the leader as the person in authority. This forms a stable eco-system when the organisational structure can sustain the division of roles. This is the primary function of the bureaucratic power structure: to allow the strata of power-seekers, who have limited appetite for the real tasks of the organisation, to dominate and control those with the talent to work. It is exactly the analogue of the feudal power structure, and at a deep level, the essential structure of a slave society. Heterodox intellectuals have no natural place within such systems: they are frontier explorers stuck in the urban jungle. They have no chance working outside the power system either. "Without fame, without money and without the recommendation of, or support from, a prestigious team of researchers, even the best of scientists, working in the most important fields, would be not listened to. "An individual with few resources, achieving what we could not do with billions of Euros. This is a scandal, and we cannot allow it". This is the message of the real capitalist society where money exerts its power. A new Einstein working in a patent office would be a scandal. Unzicker (2010, ch.1) thinks that in physics there are no longer idealistic individual thinkers, only large organizations, political interests and the rules of the science market. The role of the genius is being filled by the average technocrat. P. 86. Now here is a crux of the problem. Heterodox science contains the subset of creative geniuses capable of making real progress. Orthodox science contains few of these. But to orthodox scientists the geniuses appear indistinguishable from 'crackpots', as saints may appear indistinguishable from lunatics to ordinary 'sane' people. López Corredoira himself says of heterodox scientists that "most of them are crackpots". He assumes he himself can identify 'crackpots' too. I am sure he can up to a point – but can he – or anyone else – systematically tell crackpot ideas from radical discoveries of real value? On this point, I do not like the term 'crackpots'. Many people with wildly unconventional ideas are sane and creative; and generally speaking I think heterodox thinkers have the same spectrum of rationality as orthodox conformists. The latter are just as much 'crackpots', it is just that their 'crackpot ideas' are not original, but popular irrationalities that are too familiar to detect. The fact is that everyone is irrational and a-rational in large degree. Our primary judgements are overwhelmingly made first by reference to authority, 35 and when we try to think through consequences for ourselves, we overwhelmingly think by 'intuition' and feeling, not by 'logical rational calculation'. I also don't see much difference in the egoism stakes – although I think what is involved is perhaps a drive to individualism, as much than simple egoism. Anyway, heterodox and orthodox scientists are both inclined to intense egoism. Egoism is a universal condition of the human race. Barring a few saints or prophets perhaps, everyone is at the center of their own world view, whether we recognise it or not. What is required is tolerance and respect and empathy for the ideas of others despite our egoism. Nonetheless, there is this phenomenon that scientists are effectively divided, by personality and culture, into 'heterodox' and 'orthodox' thinkers, somewhat as López Corredoira describes. The unsuccessful or misguided heterodox thinkers who go off in pursuit of theories with no realistic chance of creating successful science vastly outnumbers the small group of gifted – or lucky heterodox thinkers who make genuine scientific discoveries. The central point is that the orthodox scientists cannot distinguish the latter from the former and do not want to. Thus we have one psycho-social dynamic that pushes modern science to its deathbed: it excludes its primary creative explorers. These people are rare, and without them science dies. 36 Philosophy of science and philosophy in sciences. López Corredoira talks not only about science but about philosophy at length, and sees problems besetting science originating in part as philosophical failures. He is keen to distinguish his approach from that of contemporary philosophy academics. "It is probable that some will identify the present book as a philosophical criticism, a charge made by many philosophers against science. Certainly, I think that the way of thinking in this book is philosophical. However, it must not be confused with the type of presentations made by self-claimed professional philosophers. Philosophy of science done by scientists or philosopher-scientists is not the same thing as philosophy of science done by pure philosophers without direct contact with the profession of scientific researcher. In my opinion, when talking about science or nature, listening to active scientists who produce their own philosophical reflections is the best option; and when talking about Philosophy with a capital P I prefer to listen to the great philosophers, that is, to the important classical philosophers rather than the mediocre specialized academicians of our own epoch. We may wonder whether the present-day philosophers of science may help science to be better, and my answer is negative; paying attention to them is a waste of time. P. 149. He is scathingly critical of the modern academic philosophy of science, but still supportive of the need for a mode of philosophical reflection in science. I will address this point in some detail. To me, a central cause of the failure of modern sciences is precisely the failure of philosophy in sciences – the exclusion of philosophical thought from science, in favour of technocratic specialisation. Indeed, this is a prime cause behind the exclusion of heterodox thinkers, who are naturally philosophical, sceptical rather than authoritarian, able to question conceptual assumptions. For philosophy requires a different type of thinking to technical learning or 'puzzle solving'. Science used to be called natural philosophy before this specialisation came to dominate, and in earlier eras, physicists were free to discuss issues of philosophical complexity. Over the last 50 years especially, the quality of philosophy in physics has been extremely degraded – killed deliberately in fact from the 1940's by an orthodox ideology. Today you find ready expressions of contempt for philosophy among physicists. Few have any idea of what philosophy means. López Corredoira recognises the difference between the general philosophy of science and philosophy in or of specific sciences, e.g. the philosophy of 37 physics, the philosophy of biology, etc. The philosophy of science is a generalised study of 'scientific method', typified by foundational programs justifying why science works, why science progresses, how the scientific method guarantees truth, how scientific theories have meaning, etc. These are typified by programs like Positivism, Instrumentalism, Empiricism, Pragmatism, Popperianism, Kuhnianism, Structuralism, etc, consolidating in the early-mid C20th, now fragmented into a thousand philosophical programs ('isms'), ranging from extreme scientistic philosophies insisting on science as the only valid means to any kind of knowledge, to equally radical critiques of scientific 'truth' as subjective, culturally relative, or merely a pragmatic form of behaviour with no meaning or truth at all. The foundational problems, of scientific method, epistemology and semantics, have most conclusively not been solved, and there is no consensus about anything in this field, except within ideological cliques. Like modern philosophy generally, it is a mess (and a paradigmatic example of the extremes of mediocrity that science itself does not want to descend into). For all the different programs or isms (positivism, instrumentalism, operationalism, Popperianism, rationalism, empiricism, relativism, constructivism, etc etc ... there are hundreds) are intimately connected with larger metaphysical systems and semantic theories, and no one agrees on these. To the outsider, the philosophy of science looks like a mess, and it is a mess. This is not to say there had been no progress in the philosophy of science over 100 years. In fact, there are a lot of real results – but they are mostly negative, especially showing the failure of all the foundational programs. There are practically no positive solutions to the fundamental problems, and the best work is buried in a morass of triviality and nonsense. If you think modern science produces trivia, try looking at the philosophy of science! Of course, scientists shudder to think their own subjects could descend to this state of mediocrity – and yet there is work of great genius scattered in this mud too. López Corredoira's attitude that "paying attention to [philosophers of science] is a waste of time" is a little too harsh. We need to extract the real insights of philosophy of science, because they have been generations – centuries actually in the making, they have been painful to establish, and they will not be reinvented from scratch except by going back over this painful process. We see this in the repeated rise and fall and rise and fall of variations of positivism, for example – a philosophy dominating in the C19th, with anti-realism about atoms, overthrown in the early C20th with the atomic realism of Plank and Einstein and Rutherford, etc, then re-established in the early-mid-C20th through instrumentalist interpretations of quantum mechanics, then partially overthrown again in later C20th, and now with multiple divisions and no consensus. 38 Philosophy within specific sciences does not have to try to solve these grandiose methodological problems: it concentrates on analysing specific concepts and assumptions, the metaphysical preconceptions underlying specific theories of a science, providing logical analysis of fraught topics. E.g. the philosophy of physics is typically about things like the possibility of a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, the completeness of quantum mechanics, the meaning of fundamental probabilities, the reality of spacetime and time flow, the nature of reversibility and time symmetry, the meaning of physical symmetries, etc. It is not distinct from physics proper: it is an extended critical analysis of the conceptual foundations of theories, and leads to reformulations of theories and to new theories. E.g. the famous EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paper on the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, Bell's theorems, and subsequently the Aspect experiments represents a famous episode in the philosophy of physics, leading from conceptual analysis and philosophical debate (featuring Einstein and Bohr) to a more rigorous theory (Bell, Kochen-Specker), and thence to a certain degree of resolution by experiment (Aspect). The larger debate is still alive, but many of the possibilities have been closed off, and the concepts sharpened. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics of Everrett and the deterministic interpretation of de BroglieBohm are related philosophical developments, addressing the same conceptual problem. I believe this kind of critical philosophy of physics is at the heart of theoretical creativity in physics. It is what thinkers like Lorentz, Plank, Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Dirac, Bohm (to name some instinctive realists who were central in the early development of modern physics), excelled at naturally and intuitively. Now physicists may scoff at the idea that this requires philosophical thinking that is anything special in comparison to 'scientific thinking'. But in the same way, some physicists have scoffed at the idea that mathematics is anything special that physicists could not have simply invented for themselves. This is simply arrogance. Pure mathematicians think in a different way to most ordinary physicists, and without mathematical theories at hand, physics would never have advanced. Natural philosophers also think in a different way to most ordinary physicists, and without philosophical conceptions at hand, ordinary physics would never have advanced. Natural mathematicians and natural philosophers were once found within the ranks of physicists and scientists. The great problem now is that physics has excluded those who think philosophically from its midst, and it has been left with a truly impoverished sense of philosophy, lacking insight into conceptual analysis, logic, semantics. To return to López Corredoira's own distinction, for a great example of philosophy in physics, which is practical and accessible and enlightening for physicists themselves, without getting into dense abstractions of analysis, see 39 (Lee, 1988), Symmetries, Asymmetries, and the World of Particles. I have included a section of his observations in Appendix 1. I think this is the kind of philosophy in physics that López Corredoira also admires, and it should be compulsory reading for physicists. However, it does not address other issues that philosophers are preoccupied with, and these are real issues, central to López Corredoira's account, commented on next. Scientific realism and truth. I will now try to illustrate in some detail how these problems in both the general philosophy of science and the specific philosophy of physics dovetail into López Corredoira's account. López Corredoira is a kind of scientific traditionalist and is in some respects quite conservative in his philosophical views, and this comes out in his positive vision of scientific knowledge, as well as his negative evaluation of the philosophy of science. He is a realist in the sense that he believes science makes claims about a real world, and its propositions are objectively true or false, and science progresses by improving the truth of its claims, and makes realistic advances in discovering truth. "I must clarify explicitly that my view of science in general is realist rather than constructivist/relativist. I may accept some degree of constructivism in a few speculative areas in science, but in general I think that science is talking [to] us about truth in nature, not merely a truth based on social consensus. I should clarify my position because a postmodern philosopher might interpret my criticism of the system of science as an attempt to defend constructivism. One might wonder why, in spite of all the problems that scientific institutions possesses, all the corruption and biases, we should trust that science is talking about truth. My answer is that science in general, all through its history, has shown the robustness of many scientific ideas as solid absolute truths about nature, independent of the social context. There is no doubt from my side that science talks about truths. Nonetheless, science is a slow process and it is quite possible that wrong ideas may dominate science for a long time. P. 151-2. But justifying this kind of view is exactly the problem that the philosophy of science has failed to solve for two centuries! How does science give any guarantee of truth about anything? If it could be shown it has a method that, properly enacted, does indeed guarantee a progression to truth, then the realist position would be justified. But no one has been able to do this. In my view, it is impossible. There is no such method available to human beings and human society, and there is no such guarantee. 40 Rather than guaranteeing a progression to truth, this is an ideal of science. It is a good ideal and the right ideal, but it may not succeed in the end, and it will at best only succeed partially. It is like democracy, which is supposed to bring freedom and justice, but fails repeatedly to achieve its ideals. There are political philosophers who try to prove that democracy has some internal logic that guarantees its ideals: but there is no such guarantee. It depends on the quality of its practice. In a corrupted society, democracy guarantees nothing, and in a corrupted institution, science guarantees nothing. The institutions of NZ society I live in are deeply corrupt, corrupted by mediocrity and incompetence and self-interest of the managerial elite, and the practice of democracy dramatically fails its ideals for large numbers of people. And in all the various institutions in NZ I have studied in and worked in, the practice of science is corrupt, and pathetically fails its ideals. On the positive side, we can only say that the present institutions are better than some alternatives – but they are still failures. Whether there are better alternatives again, whether these systems can be reformed or revolutionised, is an open question I return to at the end of this essay. López Corredoira says in the quote above that: "My answer is that science in general, all through its history, has shown the robustness of many scientific ideas as solid absolute truths about nature, independent of the social context. P. 152. The key problem is that physics (more than any other science) proposes general laws of nature – Newtonian mechanics and gravitational theory for instance, or Special Relativity or General Relativity or quantum mechanics, etc. These general laws correspond to even more general metaphysical frameworks, conceptions of the fundamental nature and contents of reality. E.g. modern physics assumes the theatre of all reality is a space-time manifold. But such general laws and their corresponding ontologies can never be proved to be universally true. And when such laws are overthrown, the entire metaphysical framework of the theories is overthrown. Even the very entities they refer to appear to disappear from reality. Today physicists think that Newtonian point particles, and classical (indivisible, point-like) atoms are not real – they are merely idealisations or approximations to quantum particles, ghostly wave functions that are absolutely unlike classical material particles or atoms. The intuitive and characteristic move is to say that earlier theories are approximately true, and science progresses through approximations to truth, but never establishes the absolute truth of general theories. This was Popper's main idea: to replace the ideal of absolute truth of general theories with one of a progression through approximately true theories. López Corredoira is unjustly critical of Popper , and does not give him credit for his real 41 achievement in philosophy of science, which was to help overthrow the dominant Positivist philosophy of his age (which is fundamentally wrong in every respect, and inculcates a totalitarian philosophy), and try to replace it with a modified form of realism. López Corredoira is most impatient when he discusses main-stream philosophy of science and semantics, and I think he does not entirely appreciate either the real difficulties or real achievements in this subject, as I will briefly try to illustrate. It is very easy to slip into thinking that this move from truth to approximate truth is just a simple matter of degree, and realism is retained. To illustrate, consider the claim: "All natural numbers are divisible by 2". The immediate response may be: "No, that is only 50% true, because every second number is not divisible by 2." But it is not 50% true: it is simply false. Mathematical statements are not partially true and partially false. What if we try: "All natural numbers are divisible by 2 or 3". Well now there are fewer exceptions – only 1/3 of examples fail instead 1⁄2 and we might say "that is more approximately true". What if we improve it with: "All natural numbers are divisible by 2 or 3 or 5". Now there are fewer exceptions again, and we might say it is more approximately true again. But what does approximately true mean? Given that none of these statements is actually true at all? Taken literally, these statements are not 'approximately true' at all: they are simply false. For they are universal generalisations: they start with "All cases of ...". What does it mean for a universal generalisation to be false? That there is at least one exception. However there is some intuitive sense in which the second statement is more 'approximately true' than the first statement – there are less exceptions but this is only a relative concept. I.e. the propositions taken literally, in themselves, are not 'approximately true': they are simply true or false. The concept of 'approximately true' only applies to relative comparisons. And it does not apply to the universal generalisation as such. It involves a reformulation of the statements to refer to the number of true or false cases of the sub-statement within the universal generalisation. If this sounds a little nit-picking, it is deliberate: it is a crucial part of the philosophical method to specify claims precisely and accurately. If we allow ourselves to uncritically say that these statements are 'approximately true', instead of identifying that they are false, we immediately get into a bog of intuitive thinking that leads to nonsense. If we want to bring out some sense in which they are 'approximately true', we must formulate this precisely. It is not the universal generalisations that are approximately true at all: as I keep saying, those statements are false. They have no intrinsic property of 'a degree of approximate truth' at all. It is only some construction around the inner clause of the universal generalisations that may be said to have a measure of 'approximate truth'. I make this point as an example of the 'nit-picking' concern over stating things with literal precision that philosophical or logical analysis really requires. Physicists are used to a rough-and-ready intuitive 42 mode of thought, and become very impatient with the method of precise logical analysis. It takes a long time to teach physics students to grasp the mode of thought that real logical analysis requires. Popper's idea was that general scientific theories – universal generalisations progress by becoming more approximately true. It should be emphasised that this threatens to throw out the concept of truth as such. It threatens the idea that we can infer any general properties of nature from such theories. E.g. Newtonian mechanics is approximately true – in terms of predicting certain phenomenon with approximate accuracy – but it is actually, literally, false, and it does not tell us the fundamental nature of space or matter. The statement that "Newtonian mechanics is approximately true" tells us something about empirical predictions – but the Newtonian laws per se do not tell us truths about the fundamental entities, e.g. the symmetries of space and time and forces and motion etc. Analogously, if the statement that "All natural numbers are divisible by 2 or 3 or 5" was true, it would tell us something very profound about the natural numbers – but it is false, and it tells us absolutely nothing true about the properties of the natural numbers. It does not tell us that "most numbers are divisible by 2 or 3 or 5" – that is a completely different statement. In the mathematical example, we might say that these false approximations are ultimately converging to a real truth, i.e. that "All natural numbers (except 1) are divisible by a prime number". But we never reach this true statement by continuing the progression of including more prime numbers in the statement. And in foundational physics, the real hope is not that we will find closer and closer approximations in an infinite series: it is that we will find the ultimate true theory of the universe. And this will tell us the fundamental truths of nature – everything about the fundamental nature of reality itself, for a naturalist or materialist. So Popper's theory of a progression of 'approximate truth' first of all makes truth relative in the sense that we can only compare the 'approximate truth' of a theory against another theory. And secondly it removes the idea that we can ever find real truth, as far as general theories describing the general nature of physical reality are concerned. And as long as general theories remain uncertain or mere approximations, what metaphysical lessons – truths about the nature of reality can we draw from them? Popper's theory also suffered from a fatal logical error. To be more than just a suggestion of a theory, it requires a precise method for defining degrees of approximate truth – defining when one theory is "more approximately true" than a rival theory. Popper proposed such a method, and defined it precisely. Good work, Popper. At face value it looked sensible, but it is logically inconsistent, essentially because there are many different ways of counting the cases that conform to an 'approximately true theory'. This inconsistency was shown in a proof by Pavel Tichy, about whom I say more below. Tichy 43 presented his critique in a seminar attended by Popper himself, and (legend has it) he concluded with a statement to the effect that "therefore Popper's theory of verisimilitude (approximation to truth) is of no value". Sir Karl apparently sat silent for some minutes, while everyone held their breath waiting for the great man to respond, and he finally said: "Tichy's demonstration of the failure of my theory is sound, but I disagree with his conclusion that it has no value. If I had not presented my wrong theory, Tichy could not have presented his beautiful disproof of it." This is an example of what I mean by the statement earlier that the philosophy of science does have valuable results – and results of genius – but they are primarily negative, showing the failure of multiple attempts, in the C19th and C20th, to give foundational solutions to the problems of scientific epistemology and semantics. Now there are positive results from philosophy too, but as illustrated next, real achievements of the first order are often lost in the great swamp of trivia that academic philosophy churns over. The tragic example of Pavel Tichy. Pavel Tichy, who disproved Popper's theory, is a tragic example of a brilliant heterodox thinker. He was a Czech political refugee to NZ, and spent most of his mature working life at Otago University in Dunedin. He was the greatest philosophical logician to work in NZ – indeed one of the handful of great logician-semanticists of the modern era, in company with Frege, Russell, Goedel, Tarski, Turing, Church, Carnap, Montague. He created a formal system of logical semantics in the 1970s-80s called TIL (transparent intensional logic) that represents the fundamental breakthroughs needed to solve a host of problems that have plagued the foundations of logic and formal semantics since Frege created the subject in the late C19th, and continue to plague it to this day. He committed suicide in 1994, aged 54 and still at the height of his powers. Practically no one in NZ philosophy even remembers him today. Among NZ philosophers, I think only a couple of his graduate students (including myself), and a couple of his professional colleagues at Otago University ever appreciated his ground-breaking work in his life time. The problem is that his theories are too technically demanding for practically any of the 50-odd professional philosophers in NZ – even though many teach courses on the same problems of semantics that he solved, focussing on any number of inferior theorists from the earlier C20th, tying their students up in knots, and continuing to hash up their own naïve theories of the same subject. He has a handful of dedicated supporters in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and one or two Easterly European countries, among whom he is considered a legend. But the wider Anglo-American community of logicians and philosophers of science – a 44 large domain within Western philosophy – has almost completely ignored his work. This is a perfect example of the death of science that López Corredoira presents: a rare heterodox genius, ignored by an extremely mediocre academic community preoccupied with their own trivia, and too incompetent to recognise ground-breaking solutions to fundamental problems when presented with them. Philosophy is often accused of this preoccupation with trivia. But it is in the most developed branches of natural science that there is now the same problem. As a footnote to this, in 2003, Tichy's supporters initiated a project to publish a collection of his published papers. To complete this, they needed to raise $20,000 for publication costs. I wrote a letter to the Vice Chancellor at Otago University, supporting their application for a grant towards this. I described Tichy as one of the seminal figures of C20th philosophy and logic, the most outstanding philosopher-logician to work in NZ, and his work as of enduring quality and importance. I emphasised the importance of having an accessible collection of his papers for scholarly research. The curt reply I received back declined funding on the grounds that Otago University had already funded a graduate student scholarship into TIL (Tichy's main theory), as well as funding a couple of visits to Otago sometime past by Pavel Materna, professor of logic and philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and Tichy's closest supporter and research colleague over his lifetime. The letter concluded with a message that if I was looking for funding for myself, I should go through appropriate university research grant channels. I gained the distinct impression I was not welcome to do so, although I had no intention of this in any case. Some time later, this position was apparently reversed, and some funding was granted. The Collected Papers of Pavel Tichy's Collected Papers in Logic and Philosophy, edited by Vladimir Svoboda, Bjorn Jesperson and Colin Cheyne, was published in 2004 jointly by Filosophia, The Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and Otago University Press. It is 901 pages and contains 46 papers. That is not a great many papers by academic standards: competitive academics today publish many hundreds or even a thousand papers. But these are all papers of quality and originality, filled with dense, complex and lucid analyses, original theoretical developments. The response from the VC reflects the attitude of bureaucratic administration that López Corredoira objects to so strongly. As an academic bureaucrat, removed from the subjects he oversees as a business CEO, the VC's problem is balancing funding priorities. He regarded awarding a scholarship for a graduate student as equivalent to the value of publishing 45 the life's work of a rare genius. He even saw the fact that the student scholarship was on the subject of the theory of the genius as a reason to deny further funding! The student scholarship represented a similar funding amount, so therefore, for the CEO, it represented a similar value donated to philosophy. There is also no appreciation that Tichy himself is the one who has given the real value to philosophy, through long years of hard and lonely work. There is instead the attitude that Tichy (or his supporters in his name) are asking for some kind of hand-out for his benefit. The VC might also say that, in retrospect, funding was not justified after all, because despite Tichy's Collected Papers being published, it did not succeed in bringing any advantages for Otago University, Tichy remains as obscure as ever, and the reputation of OU has hardly been enhanced. Did this publication bring in any new students, or raise the profile of OU? Scholarly work pursuing Tichy's TIL theory is primarily limited to about 20 papers, mainly by Marie Duzi, Bjorn Jesperson and Pavel Materna (working in the Czech Republic), published in a volume Procedural Semantics for Hyperintentional Logic, 2010. However the story of Tichy's achievement is not over yet. We should remember that Frege's theory of logic in the C19th is now considered the great watershed in the history of logic, and every logician and semanticist in the world knows who he is. But Frege was just as obscure as Tichy, almost totally ignored in his own life time. He was rescued from obscurity by Bertrand Russell in the early C20th, and it was a couple more decades before he became widely known. He is now at the center of a vast industry of academic philosophical trivia, an industry of anachronistic misinterpretations of his theories – something Tichy tried to redress too. As a final footnote to this story, at the same time I wrote a paper, intended as an introductory article to Tichy for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (for which I had just written an article on time in relativity theory (Holster, 2003, B)). The IEP had no article on Tichy. I should add these articles are free contributions, and I was invited by the editor, Brad Dowden, to propose further article topics to contribute. The peer reviewer for IEP, undoubtedly a good academic in Montague logic, had never heard of Tichy, and was unsympathetic to his objectual or realist approach. He came from a competing philosophy of logical semantics. He did not think Tichy deserved an article in the Encyclopedia. He rejected publication, not because of the quality of my article, but because he did not like the ideas or approach that it effectively advertised for a competing school of thought. The article is now posted at (WebRef Holster (k)). The IEP still has no article on Tichy. The quality of his theories goes unrecognised. 46 López Corredoira's fundamental problem. The foregoing is partly to set the context for what as I see as the fundamental problem in López Corredoira's account: the problem of judging heterodox ideas is left unsolved. He is quite aware of this. "Who decides what is or is not an absolute truth in science? That is the key question. On the one hand, conservative sectors which have the power to control science will always claim that their ideas are undeniably absolute truths; on the other hand, the few voices of the revolutionary creators of new ideas, mixed with the many voices of crackpots, will cast doubt on anything claimed as absolute truth. Think, for instance, about extreme ideas, such as creationism, which claims that the earth is only six thousand years old and denies the evolution of the species. The fact is that there is no absolute criterion for separating absolute truths from false hypotheses, although there are some quite clear cases. P. 115. López Corredoira implicitly and explicitly makes such judgements himself – "there are some quite clear cases". You can't even be a scientist without making such judgements for yourself. But the problem of judging other people's heterodox ideas is that they all look like crackpot ideas to the outsider. How does he judge? He emphasises that there is a problem with the stability of scientific knowledge – wrong theories accepted for long periods, true theories rejected for long periods but still thinks that science achieves certain absolute objective truths. "False theories may last for centuries or even more than a thousand years and still be accepted without any doubts. In Chapter 2, I gave some examples of this, Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy being one example. There have also been many other theories which were important for a long time, but which were eventually demonstrated to be wrong: the phlogiston theory, the caloric theory, Newtonian optics, the proposal of the existence of an "ether", etc. The opposite thing is also true. There are ideas which have been rejected, and forgotten for a long time, until they are later recovered and become successful ways of explaining phenomena, examples being the heliocentric theory, tectonic plate theory, etc. P.107. Now how does he know that these specific ideas – the phlogiston theory, the caloric theory, Newtonian optics, the 'ether' theory – are really wrong? López Corredoira thinks science eventually accepts good theories, and conclusively dismisses bad ones. 47 "Science has achieved some truths which will possibly last forever, and no revolution will be able to deny them. Atomic theory will last forever, I guess; I think Archimedes' principle of hydrostatics in incompressible fluids will persist forever; the bacteriological origin of some illnesses will be certain forever; etc. This explains why science is a more conservative system than other human affairs. Only in some fields where the truth is not so immediately clear-for instance, the origin of life, cosmology, the final components of matter, etc.-is there the possibility for some kind of revolution, and this is the place where conservative scientists try to defend their power against the possible revolutions of progressive ideas. p.113. Here he seems to suggest that in most fields "the truth is immediately clear", and that "only in some fields where the truth is not so immediately clear ... is there the possibility for some kind of revolution". But this is the problem: heterodox scientists will strongly disagree about what "truth is immediately clear". Who decides and by what criterion? Now López Corredoira considers himself a materialist, reductionist, empiricist and atheist – so conservative in some ways about the limits of science. He believes the world is purely physical. "We live with illusions in order to cheat our fears. At present, we live with the illusion that a longer life with a lot of medicine and surgical operations is better than a shorter life without visiting physicians. However, we are going to die, and there is no life after death; that is the most important truth, for which science cannot produce anything more. P.169. He rejects 'metaphysics' (I think meaning 'speculative metaphysics') as a form of objective knowledge – although without dismissing its value as a human activity. He is passionate about the value of philosophy as a part of cultural heritage – but he means traditional philosophy, and he is dismissive of 'modern philosophy' as having a role within science proper. He is a reductionist, careful to emphasise for example that his realist language for abstract entities like 'knowledge' do not commit him to any metaphysical beliefs that abstract entities exist in themselves. "Indeed, the consideration of "knowledge" as an entity is an artefact but so is the concept of "person", and many others which are useful in shaping our vision of the world. In fact, the only entity in nature is nature itself, in the form of matter-energy, but we can carry out an exercise in thought by isolating some particular structures and treating 48 them as if they were autonomous entities, self-organized structures which make their own decisions. In my opinion, free will is an illusion, and all organisms or beings are simply fragments of nature, driven by its laws. His metaphysical belief in materialism (which he sometimes states as naturalism) already sets powerful limits for him about what ideas can be taken seriously in science. For instance, he is dismissive of research into spirituality or psi or paranormal phenomenon, and thinks this is essentially an area for cranks, since he believes these things have been scientifically ruled out with practical certainty. "Wallace would move towards spiritualism (even geniuses get lost in stupid ideas; Newton also dedicated an important part of his life to alchemy or theology), and he maintained that natural selection cannot account for mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, as well as metaphysical musings, and wit and humour. Wallace eventually said that something in "the unseen universe of Spirit" had interceded at least three times in history. The first was the creation of life from inorganic matter. The second was the introduction of consciousness in the higher animals. And the third was the generation of the higher mental faculties in mankind. He also believed that the raison d'être of the universe was the development of the human spirit. These views greatly disturbed Darwin, who argued that spiritual appeals were not necessary and that sexual selection could easily explain apparently non-adaptive mental phenomena. P. 45-46. López Corredoira thinks we already essentially have the permanent scientific truth about the nature of consciousness and mind and spirit: i.e. whatever we refer to by these terms are really material entities or material processes. But here we already have a contentious judgement. On this point, and other points of scientific judgement, I disagree with him – and there is no broad scientific consensus. To me, consciousness has never been explained by materialist science, indeed there is no prospect in sight for its explanation in current physical science; and to me, psi is a perfectly valid area for scientific research, whatever you think its prospects of success are, because the host of psi phenomenon have never been satisfactorily explained by natural science, and certainly not in a way capable of achieving a broad consensus. From his faith in evolution to give a materialist explanation of the origin of life he also says: "Ideas like 'intelligent design' or similar are not science. P.46. 49 And yet to me this is an open question. For a popular point these days: how do we know we were not 'designed' in part by an alien species that deliberately colonised earth with life since we seem to be on the cusp of being able to send genetically pre-designed organisms to colonise other planets ourselves? If we ever achieve a high-level mastery of genetic design, how many end-features would we pre-design to evolve in a scenario of transferred evolution? Of course, for many scientists, 'intelligent design' means something more specific: the direct intelligent design of humans by God, with a connotation of creationism. But in reality, many shades of 'design' and many types of 'designers' are possible. Scientific evidence for 'intelligent design' should revolve around isolating features of genetic code and environment that could not plausibly have just appeared by chance, and that point to a deliberate intention. Intelligent design is an identifiable feature of our own technology (e.g. a clock). What we can subsequently infer about the designer – whether God or alien or human – is another question, and preconceptions about this should not prevent us examining various structures, environments, or indeed the world as a whole, for evidence of intelligent design. Stephen Meyer's (2009) The Signature in the Cell is an extended argument that the hypothesis of intelligent design is an open scientific question – and Meyer gives a sophisticated treatment of central issues in the philosophy of science, especially the nature of explanation. Now if we plan to liberalise the sciences to more readily encompass heterodox ideas, who is going to make the judgement calls on which heterodox ideas have some scientific quality, and which are 'crackpot' theories? This is the fundamental problem – the problem that philosophy of science has never been able to solve, and barely even tries to address: that the pre-scientific judgement of ideas (before they are subject to close scientific scrutiny, evaluation, or experiment) is not covered by the scientific method. The orthodox solution to this is peer-review by experts: but of course the peer review of heterodox ideas by orthodox scientists is precisely the original problem. It falls back on subjective judgement, not objective evaluation. López Corredoira has a number of suggestions to redress this problem. His fundamental impulse is to give judgement and decision making back to the individual scientists, and take it back from the bureaucratic system of 'expert peer reviewers' and power hierarchies of 'scientific authorities'. He starts with a proposal to liberalise publications. "We have too many people doing science, and few of them who have the power do not want to be mixed up with the vast hordes of creators. It is all a question of the will to power. Therefore, they prefer to maintain the barriers which separate the good science from the bad science, with all the consequent biases introduced in this selection: Lots of mediocre misguided ideas are published in important journals, 50 whereas many bad papers and a few genuine ideas are left aside unpublished or published in minor publications which almost nobody reads. My suggestion would be to allow the important media to publish all kind of contributions, at least in an electronic version on the internet, which is cheaper. For instance, arXiv.org could stop the filtering of papers and allow the posting of all kinds of publications related to the scientific topics they cover, even papers from amateurs. Some scientists think this would be terrible because important knowledge would be drowned by huge numbers of papers by amateurs, but this is not true: It can be shown that before 2004, the date at which the filtering of papers was introduced on arXiv.org, the number of papers produced by crank amateurs was a small portion of the total; they do not disturb the flow of information produced by professional scientists, and they introduce some fun touching on questions which are not usually dealt with by paid researchers. P.186-187. arXiv.org is the major preprint site for physics, and he is really only suggesting it return to its former, pre-2004 model of being self-regulating. (And he is right: its filtering process has only led to its manipulation by editors to censor ideas.) But he has a more radical proposal in mind. "For major journals, instead of a peer review system to ensure quality, I would suggest that anybody with a Ph.D. in any scientific discipline may publish; something similar is also proposed by Gillies. It might be supposed that a Doctor of Philosophy already has sufficient maturity to know what he is doing , although the journals could ask experts to recommend revisions of the papers, but only to improve them with constructive criticism, not to reject them unless the author decides to withdraw the paper; or they could allow experts to post their comments on the published papers (Ietto-Gillies). P. 187. This doesn't seem realistic to me – won't academics just send rafts of papers to the highest-ranked journal in the field? Anyway, most major journals are privately owned commercial enterprises , and the owners certainly would not consider this viable. It undermines their whole function and purpose and rationale. Far more appealing I think would be to provide alternative free on-line self-regulating pre-publication journals in all fields. We have free preprint sites such as arXiv.org for physics, and philsci-archive for philosophy of science. There is a problem that these two sites in particular are controlled by private interest groups, with distinct ideologies, and they are prone to abuse – not in general perhaps, but specifically in the context of publishing heterodox ideas in the specialist fields of the editors. 51 General sites provided by an independent authority, with censorship only of abusive or offensive material, or material entirely outside the scope of the subject (e.g. publishing political diatribes or novels as science preprints) would have real value. The philpapers.org site is a good model for this – it does not have the censorship of philsci-archive, which is an instrument of the Pittsburg University Department of Philosophy and History of Science, in conjunction with the Philosophy of Science journal, and used to control the subject to their agendas. I will return to this example later in Part 2. López Corredoira then makes a number of further suggestions in regard to funding and resource-sharing mechanisms. They are interesting ideas, but I do not see most them as practical – although probably he does not either: they illustrate the need for reforms, not the practicality of such reforms. My favourite one however is the following radical proposal. "The assigning of positions, either Ph.D. grants or postdocs or permanent positions, is more difficult to solve, given that there are more applications than positions. This should be addressed with an appropriate education system, and a new direction in the job of researcher. Indeed, many of the present-day researchers do not have a true vocation for science and natural philosophy; they are mostly technocrats who might be redirected to jobs as engineers or computer experts or something similar. A reduction in the salaries of researchers would also reduce very significantly the number of people who want to do research; perhaps, the State could offer a free house and food and a small salary for other expenses, to encourage an austere way of life, dedicated to study and thinking rather than linking business and conference-tourism with science. Once this regulation is done, I am sure that the number of people who would want to do research would be much lower, and with a higher passion for science; there would be a place for all of them without need of a competitive selection system. There would also be fewer papers and conferences, less knowledge in which to be drowned, which would also be a positive outcome. I like that suggestion a lot, especially in the NZ context. However, the point I want to make here is that none of López Corredoira's suggestions addresses the fundamental problem of how to judge the value of heterodox ideas themselves: how to tell the ideas of 'cranks' and 'crackpots' from those of geniuses; how to tell which current scientific laws or theories are 'truths that will last forever', and which will be subject to revision or revolution in the future; how to tell which heterodox ideas have enough value to be worth pursuing. If he could solve that problem, he would solve the fundamental problem of philosophy of science. Without solving this fundamental problem, the 52 options to find a methodological solution to the problem of organizing scientific research to appropriately value heterodox ideas are limited. But I do not believe that problem has a methodological, i.e. rule-based, solution – it inevitably comes back to individual human judgment: the application of 'refined intuition'. However, I do think there is an alternative concept to the simplistic realist goal of achieving truth that helps analyze our intuitions about scientific robustness and progress, which I make a brief detour to explain next. Explanation as the key quality criterion. I posed the question earlier: how does López Corredoira know that "the phlogiston theory, the caloric theory, Newtonian optics, the proposal of the existence of an 'ether', etc" have been conclusively excluded from science – and will not be revived at some later date to haunt us? Alternatively, how does he know that theories of "the origin of life, cosmology, the final components of matter, etc" are still open to revision? I think the answer lies in the ability to judge the quality of explanation achieved in these areas, not the ability to judge the 'objective truth' of proposed general laws of nature or theories. In the case of phlogiston, for example, it was proposed to explain the nature of fire. The accepted explanation of fire is now that it is a chemical process, essentially of oxidisation. Now our present explanation of fire may not be entirely right in all its details, there may be important things still missing from the account, but it is surely correct in its basic identification of cause and effect. Fire results when some unstable compounds react chemically with oxygen, forming new compounds, and releasing heat. The heat comes from the molecular bonding energies. This general explanation is so well-tested experimentally it is scientifically conclusive. As a result, the whole purpose of the phlogiston hypothesis is redundant. Now phlogiston has never been detected, but how do we know it might not one day be revived as a substance? What if the chemical theory is one day found to be wrong? Well, that might happen – in fact it did happen! The original classical chemical theory was wrong – a lot wrong it was replaced by better classical theories and eventually the quantum theory but the essential causal explanation for fire still did not change. Phlogiston was not reinstated. The chemical explanation is a causal explanation. It identifies the causes of fire. It lets the fire investigator say: "this particular fire started because there was fuel and oxygen present and a source of ignition (activation energy) and consequently the compound in the fuel oxidised into the new compound ...". Now the causal nature is related to the fact that this supports counterfactuals. "If (counterfactually) the situation was different and there was 53 no fuel, or no oxygen, or no ignition source, then there would have been no fire." It is widely recognised in the philosophy of science that laws of nature must support counterfactual reasoning. This goes hand in hand with the fact that good explanations must equally support counterfactuals. Note that the explanation is not just a set of facts: "There was fuel, there was oxygen, there was ignition. There was fire." It is also not a logical derivation (as in Hempel's positivist theory of explanation, widely taught in philosophy of science): i.e. it is not a derivation like: There was fuel, there was oxygen, there was ignition. [Facts] When there is fuel, oxygen and ignition there is always fire. [Universal law] Therefore: There was fire. [Logical conclusion] It is a statement of causation: this is what the term 'because' signifies. And causal inference is not captured by propositional logic. Explanations can be stated as propositions of course: "there was fire because there was fuel, oxygen and ignition". This states a proposition, and it may be true or false in a particular case. They can be quantified to give general scientific truths: e.g. "all the planets, asteroids, comets, etc, in the solar system rotate around the sun because they are attracted by its gravity." But this is not a simple quantified proposition, like laws of physics, or a simple fact, like statements of initial conditions. It contains a special logical operator: Because. This acts as a counterfactual implication. Few outside the circles of philosophical logic know this, but the logic of counterfactuals – which is essential for the logic of causal explanations – has proved extremely troublesome, ever since the time of John Stuart Mill in the C19th, and still has no accepted formalisation (as quantificational logic has) . The term because has no accepted formal logical analysis. Yet statements of causation are surely the most durable and objective scientific truths we have. Now there is indeed an insurmountable problem, exactly as Popper and many others have argued, in conclusively justifying the universal truth of general (universalised) laws or theories. You may believe that quantum mechanics or GTR (the general theory of relativity) gives us exactly true universal laws of nature – but is it possible to prove that? How do you know they will not be replaced in the future, found to have exceptions, to be approximations, just as classical physics turned out be an approximation? Well we just can't know – as Popper holds, we can only verify that general theories are false, when they are found to fail: we can never conclusively prove they are true. In fact, all the evidence is that there must be a 'unified theory' that goes beyond these two partial theories – since they contradict each other and it is an open question whether either QM or GTR will turn out to be exactly true in the new framework theory, or whether they will be 54 reduced to approximations within a larger theory, as happened with the classical theories of mechanics, gravity and electromagnetism. And it is not simply a matter of proving factual observations: these large theories bring their own theoretical ontologies, of unobservable hypothetical entities, and when they are overthrown, their whole ontology goes out of the window. Personally I believe QM and GTR are both approximations – which means their fundamental theoretical ontologies are wrong. Most physicists seem to believe they are exactly true – that we live in an historically privileged era, when our fundamental theories are finally absolute, unlike every other era in history. I think this is delusionary. But it has a huge effect on how you look for a unified theory. If you constrain the theory to render GTR in exactly its present form or to render QM in exactly its present form, then you place a huge constraint on the possible theories you can consider. If you allow theories that generate GTR and QM as approximate theories (as happened in the change from classical to modern physics), then there are far more possibilities. Most orthodox physicists seem committed as a scientific dogma to retaining GTR and QM in exactly their present forms, and they consequently snub attempts to formulate a theory that renders them as approximations. They think that this is delusional, and refuse to contemplate it. Hence we find a very real and insurmountable barrier to heterodox unified theories of physics. Any theory that revises the foundational framework of QM and GTR steps outside the orthodox paradigm, and is rejected from consideration in the pre-scientific evaluation, before it can be scientifically evaluated at all. But in any case, returning to the original question: I agree with López Corredoira that the phlogiston theory, the caloric theory, and Newtonian optics are all wrong and have been made permanently redundant concepts in science – because conclusive and quite comprehensive explanations have been given, using alternative theories, for the phenomenon they are proposed to explain. And these theories have no role other than to explain these phenomenon. There is no other reason to consider them as viable theories. I also agree with him that theories of the origin of life, cosmology, and the final components of matter are still wide open for revision – because the explanations offered are far from being conclusive or comprehensive. To see what I mean, try to complete the following six sentences: The dinosaurs died out because __________________________ The Earth rotates around the Sun because __________________ Life appeared on Earth because __________________________ The universe has its cosmology because ____________________ The electron and proton exist because _____________________ Humans have consciousness because ______________________ 55 I would say science knows the answer to the first two with effective certainty – not absolute certainty, but as much as certainty has any meaning for human science. But science does not have any conclusive answers to the last four questions at all. Note also that science discovered the answer to the second question in Newton's time: the sun's gravity attracts it... This answer remains true even though we have changed from the Newtonian theory of gravity to Einstein's theory, i.e. GTR. This shows that theoretical explanations can be robust against changes of foundational theories. And even if the detailed theory of gravity changes again, the answer to this will still be the same. This is why I think scientific knowledge can, in certain cases, be effectively certain, and science makes definitive progress over time. Even though general (universalised) scientific laws are never certain, this stable core of scientific knowledge is also theoretical, and is more than just an accumulation of simple facts. This stable core of scientific knowledge lies in generalised causal explanations. All real scientists have a powerful intuition that science makes progress. It cannot be confirmed as a definite progression to true theories. I think it can only be confirmed as a definite progression to good explanations. From this point of view, a key question to ask about any scientific claim (beyond simple facts of observation) is: what is its explanatory value? This is what I ask about the claim of Materialism, for example, that tells us that consciousness is purely a material phenomenon. What explanatory value does this have? In fact: none that I can see. "Your thoughts are generated purely by the activity of the atoms in your brain". This may or may not be true: but what explanatory value does it have? How does it explain my consciousness to me? It doesn't. It doesn't do anything to give a causal explanation of why we are conscious. It is just a hand-waving claim that whatever explanation is given it will be materialistic. To me, this is merely a metaphysical claim (in a negative sense), and a claim that no one in the present state of science can verify – there simply being no good causal explanation for consciousness at all yet. In fact many scientists assume something stronger: a functionalist explanation of consciousness. The assumption is that if you map all the 'logical connections' between the firing of neurons in a brain (the 'neural net') into another representation (e.g. a digital representation on a computer), the result will be a simulation of consciousness – an artificial consciousness. There is absolutely no evidence for this – yet it is widely assumed by materialist physicists and computer scientists that this must represent consciousness. Here science turns into science fantasy. But this passes as sound scientific sense in many circles; while sceptics who question this dogma will typically be scorned as unscientific, anti-materialistic mystics. 56 Before going back to López Corredoira's discussion, and some examples of heterodox science, I pause to introduce some other general concepts that are central to understanding the philosophical debate. Kantianism versus empiricism. I will briefly recount another central controversy in the philosophy of science and epistemology, which has a long history. This is useful to gain a perspective on the deep flaws in the empiricist philosophy which leaves modern scientists with a completely misleading theory of science. The fundamental point is that scientific theories are not simply derived by a logical process of 'induction' from atomic empirical observations. Theories are intrinsically based in the capacity of the human mind to apply conceptual systems, and scientific theories are limited to the kinds of models or conceptual structures the human mind is prefabricated to visualise. The simplistic empiricist-inductivist philosophy takes it as an axiom that all empirical knowledge – knowledge of the external physical world comes ultimately from empirical perceptions, or sequences of sensory impressions. Such perceptions are limited to specific facts, and it is thought that we make generalisations from such facts, discovering patterns in phenomenon, encoded in general laws, to eventually give larger scientific theories. This empiricist philosophy was elaborated largely by British empiricists, with the iconic figures of Locke and Hume in the C18th, John Stuart Mill in the C19th, followed notably by Bertrand Russell in the early C20th – before being overrun by the more extreme Logical Positivist (also called Logical Empiricist) philosophy after the 1920s. Other European philosophy remained more open to rationalist and metaphysical traditions, reflecting a very Anglo versus Continental philosophy divide. The primitive empiricist theory is often referred to as the 'tabla rasa' theory – that the human mind is a 'blank slate', on which facts are written by perception. Generalisations are then determined by logical operations, abstraction and generalisation. (We 'abstract' common features of individual facts, and 'generalise' them as patterns or rules). Russell and other early C20th empiricists were most concerned to develop logical theories justifying theoretical scientific knowledge as a structure built on top of empirical 'atoms'. But this tabla rasa theory is utterly misleading. It has no scientific evidence at all. It is a metaphysical arm-chair rationalisation, itself based on 'logical introspection', or the projection of a conceptual vision. (When philosophers say: "Things must be this way, because it is the only way that makes rational sense", they are invariably in the grip of a metaphysical vision, and they are telling us about the limits of their imagination.) The scientific fact is that the 57 human mind is not a 'blank slate': it is born with highly structured perceptual and conceptual structures pre-formed. These already determine its capacity to perceive and think and project conceptual models and represent them in language. In evolutionary terms, the human mind is already a highly-evolved perceptual device, attuned to its empirical environment. Thus it is perfectly logical that it has inherited knowledge – indeed it is inevitable that certain types of representational models are innate in our mental structures. We cannot remember specific factual experiences from our ancestors – but we have inherited more or less specific structures to represent and process knowledge. Given that these have evolved to be accurate to represent the external world (an assumption of empiricism), they already represent a lot of pre-conceived assumptions about the world. These are preconceptions about the way the world is logically structured. We see this in geometry, a classical example famous from Plato's time. Geometry appears to defy empiricism. For it is an a priori science, worked out from fundamental principles (axioms) that appear given to us by our own rational faculties. Euclidean geometry, explicitly based on logical reasoning from axioms, has the qualities of mathematics: and yet it quite accurately describes the geometry of the physical world. For straight lines and areas and volumes and so on, defined by empirical objects (rules and strings and light-beams and material surfaces), behave in accordance with mathematical geometry. The Egyptian pyramids and Greek temples were built using geometric principles, and they work. Thus it appears that some empirical knowledge is provided by our innate 'logical' ability to conceive of geometry. Now of course you might object that geometry has since been generalised to non-Euclidean geometries, famously by Riemann in the C19th. And it is then an open question which variation of geometry is actually exactly empirically accurate. So physical geometry is not fully determined by a priori mathematics after all. But this is not a real objection to the point. First, non-Euclidean geometries were also worked out a priori, as logical refinements of Euclidean geometry (generalising the 'parallel axiom' of Euclid). It is not as if we discovered nonEuclidean geometries empirically, by finding that Euclidean geometry is not quite accurate. And second, the critical point: our ability to formulate theories of physical geometry is dependant on our innate ability to conceive of these mathematical geometries in the first place. Now I agree that this innate ability does not determine truths about empirical geometry – rather, it is necessary for us even to begin conceiving empirical theories. If we could not consciously conceive geometric structures and reason about them mentally, we could never create scientific theories about physical geometry, no matter how many 'perceptual facts' about material objects we collected. 58 In fact, we cannot create a language to represent perceptual facts about geometry without first having innate conceptual structures to host them. The very idea that human perceptions are themselves some kind of 'atomic language' for 'empirical facts' to be imprinted on the 'tabla rasa' of the mind is a fantasy. Modern psychology shows that perceptions are highly constructed entities. Perceptions may be sparked by sensory inputs (light beams for instance), but what we experience and report in our perceptions are constructed images. We construct an imagistic world appearing to us as a world of 'solid objects', not a field of light-beams. We have no direct contact with external 'physical reality' in this sense. What we 'see' is an internal theatre, constructed by our minds. It is already rendered in a kind of mental language. We fail to see the vast bulk of detail in our environment – the eye only perceives a small band of wavelengths, the ear only hears a small range of frequencies. When it comes to secondary perceptions – of secondary physical qualities like colour and temperature – and even more so of human behaviour, social facts, qualities of other minds – our constructions of 'facts' are extremely subjective, and culturally dependant. This failure of empiricism should be obvious to any scientist today, because our modern scientific theories are so explicitly dependant on something we bring from our minds: mathematical models. Modern theories of physics are expressed as complex mathematical models – so complex they are only just within the capacity of the best mathematical intellects to visualise. What if reality is a little more complex than any humans can visualise? Then no matter how much more 'data' we collect, we will never conceptualise the right theory. What if the nature of reality is of a different kind to the mathematical models we can visualise? Those models are suited to atomistic reductionist structures – a projection of the mind. What if the real structures are fundamentally different? "How could they be?" You may demand. Well there are many inklings. One example is the discovery of fractal structures, like the Mandelbrot set, and closely associated chaotic structures, which lie outside of conventional dynamics to describe. Many scientists have become entranced by the possibility that reality may be based on fractal structures, fundamentally different to the atomistic models now pursued in main-stream physics. Another example is the experience of mystics, who report perceptions of 'reality' as having distinct 'holistic', 'timeless', 'interpenetrating' qualities that are inexpressible in normal language. "Oh nonsense, they are fantasying! There is no scientific evidence! Religious buffoons!" the scientistic empiricists say. But they are not listening. These mystical experiences are real and common; and this is exactly what we might expect if the human mind has evolved to have some deeper innate perception of the nature of reality, that goes beyond reductionist models of mathematical physics, or of normal language to express. This is to say, our very paradigm of physical ontology used in normal 59 science may prove inadequate to describe the essence of reality – it may describe only superficial patterns that we are adapted as physical creatures to live with. And the idea that reality may be more complex than we can comprehend mathematically is strongly supported in mathematics itself: for it is clear we can conceptualise only the tiniest fragments of mathematical structure. The real number line (or geometric continuum), apparently simple to our intuitions, actually has a second-order infinity of points: this infinity is so huge and its properties so unimaginable that we cannot hope to understand more than a tiny fragment of its properties in our finite and discrete languages. Another example, of special interest to me, is the dimensionality of space. We are hard-wired to visualise three-dimensional spatial images. This appears to be evolutionarily selected by our environment: for in normal life, we move and act in three dimensions. Euclidean geometry not only encodes the assumption of a 'flat' geometry (which Riemann generalised to curved geometries), but the assumption of three dimensional geometry. The most revolutionary realistic proposal of modern physics is that space has more than three dimensions. We cannot visualise hyper-dimensional structures mentally: we can only work with them using mathematics, at the cusp of human ability. If we (or rather: if at least a few people) did not have this mathematical ability, we could not even ask this question about reality from an empirical perspective. Science is constrained by our innate mental abilities: it is not a boundless logical power, constrained only by data collection. All the applied sciences now require substantial mathematical-statistical modelling to make progress, to express theories. But they have outstripped the mathematical abilities of the vast bulk of their own practitioners. Few applied scientists in practice today can work with the mathematics required to comprehend their empirical data in meaningful theoretical structures – or to understand the work of the few who have created the most advanced mathematic models. This is a practical crisis in science, and empiricism comes to a shuddering halt: for scientists can and do keep endlessly collecting data, without having the capacity to make sense of it. Empiricist philosophy fails to justify scientific progress, or to serve as any foundation for scientific method, because it ignores the fact that human science involves bringing the human mind, with its pre-determined capacity for mental visualisations and for imposing its own rationality on the world, to the party. The capacities and limitations of the human mind are intrinsic to scientific discovery and judgement. There is no automated logical method of scientific discovery apart from this. A philosophy of science that ignores and overlooks this fundamental fact is too crude to be taken seriously. 60 C18th philosophers, as exemplified by Immanuel Kant, were well aware of this, and put it in terms of a distinction between phenomena and noumena – a distinction going back in essence to the earliest philosophers in all traditions; for philosophy was born with the conscious realisation that reality is different to appearance: that the world presented to our senses is transcended by another world, hidden from our perception. In Kantian terms, 'phenomena' are what we perceive and measure empirically, but they are only the appearance of things. 'Noumena' ('things-in-themselves') refers to the 'ultimate reality' underlying appearances: the being of things. The question for science is whether it can tell us only about phenomena, or whether it can penetrate to the noumena, and tell us how reality is ultimately represented. If you believe science identifies fundamental causes, fundamental irreducible essences of things, then you believe it brings us metaphysical truths about noumena. If you think this is beyond it, then you think it beings knowledge only of phenomena. The C19th Positivists – the most famous figure being Mach, who had an early influence on Einstein thought that scientific knowledge is limited to phenomena. Scientific laws and generalisations, and their theoretical ontologies (like imperceptible 'atoms'), in their view, are merely systems of rules telling us about regularities among phenomena: ultimately, connections of regularity among empirical observations. They denied the reality of atoms and fields and forces and so forth – calling them 'intervening variables'. Their terms – the key terms in most scientific equations have no realistic reference to anything in nature. They are to be understood instead through an anti-realist semantics: as meaning their 'observational' content. Thus the huge debate in C19th philosophy of science was about the reality of atoms, with most taking the positivist view that they are unreal and unverifiable. This view was not overthrown until the early C20th – Einstein's (1905) theory of Brownian motion was a turning point in establishing atomic realism. The victory of realism over positivism was short-lived however: the logical positivists or logical empiricists soon appeared with a new brand of anti-realism, in the 1920's, and swamped scientific philosophy through the medium of quantum theory. This left an enduring stamp on C20th scientific philosophy: the dominance of the empiricist-inductivist-positivist-materialist philosophy. The dogma of 'inductivism' is a major strand in this philosophy of scientific method, which I briefly comment on next. One of the persisting delusions of the empiricist ideology lies in a parallel belief in induction. Induction refers to a (mythological) method conceived of as: (i) collecting factual observations, and 61 (ii) subsequently discovering patterns in them, and (iii) generalising these to formulate general empirical laws, and (iv) generalised these further to create higher-level theories. 'Theories' here mean comprehensive explanatory frameworks, with theoretical ontologies, covering large domains, as opposed to individual 'empirical laws of regularity'. You will see 'induction' referred to constantly, like 'scientific method' itself, when scientistic philosophers start pontificating about epistemology. But 'induction' is not a real method: scientific discovery and inference does not resemble this pattern, except in very limited cases. There are cases where discoveries have been made by deliberate use of an 'inductive' method – where scientists deliberately collect data, and subsequently find patterns that turn out to represent significant 'laws'. Certainly collecting data and looking for patterns is a valid technique in certain middle-stages of a scientific investigation. But it is only a very partial and inadequate method in general. Referring to the points above: (i) You have to start with some reason for collecting data, for recording certain variables from the vast number of possible variables; this is usually only when concepts and hypotheses have already matured enough to deserve careful testing; (ii) there is no logical reliable way of discovering 'patterns' from observational data – sure, sometimes you find significant simple patterns; but usually patterns of causality remain hidden because they are multi-layered, multi-causal, they require a deeper framework to conceptualise; the science of pattern recognition, as pursued in AI studies, is still extremely primitive, and has no general methods that could possibly be used as a general basis for scientific discovery and theory creation; (iii) science rarely progresses by formulating law-like generalisations; far more commonly it progresses by discovering explanations, primarily causal explanations; and these are made by intuitively identifying causes, often from single phenomenon, not by subsuming effects under 'inductive generalisations'; (iv) high-level theories – which are explanatory theories, explaining complex phenomenon through simpler ontologies of entities are never discovered inductively: they are creations of the human mind. They involve creations of theoretical languages and ontologies. Perhaps the area where 'induction' is most hyped today is in Artificial Intelligence (AI) studies – the use of automated computer programs to discover patterns in data. This is a very interesting field of study, no doubt 62 about that, and it is of practical importance. But so far it is very naïve, and has no prospects for the kind of success in creating 'thinking machines', that can outstrip humans in scientific ability, that its proponents boast of. Computers are effectively programmed in ad hoc ways that use low-level pattern recognition as a basis for taking actions – e.g. flying machines, responding to their environments. But these programs are developed and tested by humans, using human intuition, and hard-programmed into the machines. There is nothing even remotely resembling the flexible conceptual ability of human beings to think, to construct novel languages, novel concepts – which we do by growing an organic neuronal network. This is seen easily enough because AI programmers have not made a dent in the fundamental problem of programming machines to interpret and process natural language semantics. The domain of AI is dominated by enthusiastic technocrats fixated on a paradigm of syntactic programming – i.e. manipulation of symbols – without realising that syntactic models must capture semantics to succeed. But perhaps this failure is a good thing at this point in history: we should all shudder at the prospects for harm of successful AI programs under the control of our present generation of technocrats and bureaucrats. The most famous critique of empiricism, and the major philosophical tradition for most Western philosophers outside the Anglo-empiricist world, goes back to the German philosopher Kant in the C18th, mentioned above. Most European scientists of previous generations – such as Einstein – were familiar with the Kantian view, and this helped them keep a perspective on the Anglo-empiricist dogmas. I will not try to introduce Kant's philosophy here, it is far too involved for any summary. But one main legacy, known to practically all philosophers today, lies in a distinction he made between the four-fold classification of knowledge illustrated below. I present this here, as it is extremely helpful for understanding the philosophical discussions. Table 1. Kantian classification of propositions. Kantian classifications Analytic Synthetic A priori Analytic a priori Synthetic a priori A posteriori Analytic a posteriori Synthetic a posteriori  The analytic/synthetic distinction is about semantic content: does a proposition refer to facts about external reality (synthetic) or merely to logical or definitional facts about the meanings of terms (analytic). 63  The a priori/a posterioiri distinction is about source of knowledge: is a proposition known from external empirical evidence (a posteriori), or from rational intuition or reasoning (a priori). This 2 X 2 classification generates four possible categories of propositions. The first two are allowed by both empiricists and rationalists.  Analytic a priori knowledge is non-empirical, but tells us nothing substantive about the world. E.g. logical tautologies, like: If P and Q are true then P is true. Truths by definition, like: All bachelors are unmarried. These follow from the semantics of the terms alone.  Synthetic a posteriori knowledge is empirical, and tells us substantive facts about the world. E.g. ordinary perceptual observations: the sky is blue. Empirical scientific observations: The earth is the third planet from the sun. Empiricists insist that these are the only two classes of genuine propositional knowledge. They wish to identify: a priori = analytic = vacuous, and synthetic = a posteriori = empirical. But there is also the third combination:  Synthetic a priori knowledge is non-empirical (being known by reason alone, not observation), but still tells us something substantive. For Kant, mathematics: 5 + 7 = 12 and geometry: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line are examples of this. Also, for Kant, principles of ethics are in this category. It is this class of the synthetic a priori that is contentious, at the center of long philosophical disputes. Empiricists want to rule it out, but Kant embraces it. It allows the possibility of metaphysics, in this specific sense: such truths would be available to us from our rationality alone, without empirical observation. Rationalists generally believe that there are such a priori truths. The empiricists deal with apparently synthetic a priori propositions by reassigning them to one of the other two categories, or rejecting them as 'meaningless metaphysics'. E.g. most empiricists take mathematics and geometry to be analytic a priori, denying it has any content – variously holding it is 'logical knowledge' (Russell logicism), or 'true by definition' (Russell – conditionalism), or merely represents a 'syntactic game of symbols' (Hilbert – formalism – maths is not propositional at all). However John Stuart Mill, the leading empiricist of the C19th, took the view that mathematics is empirical, and thus synthetic a posteriori. Propositions about ethics, aesthetics, etc, are rejected as objective knowledge by empiricists on the basis of materialist reductionism, being dismissed as merely 'subjective belief'. 64 The traditional war in epistemology is between rationalism and empiricism. Plato is the most famous Rationalist, and mathematical Platonists (including Frege and Tichy) believe mathematics is real knowledge about a realm of abstract or non-physical entities, i.e. mathematical objects like numbers. My point is not to embrace the Kantian classification as such, or hold that there is a genuine class of synthetic a priori knowledge. Rather, it is that the class of synthetic a posteriori (i.e. purely empirical) propositions is certainly not adequate as a foundation for science – for scientific knowledge is really an inextricable combination of empirical information perceived through mental constructions. However my aim here is not to argue over this abstract philosophy, but rather to alert the reader that there are serious defects in the simplistic empiricist-inductivist dogmas. Note that there is also the possible fourth combination of:  Analytic a posteriori knowledge tells us nothing substantive about the world, but is gained from empirical observation. I do not know any examples claimed of this – Kant thought it vacuous. Note also there are two other categories commonly used by philosophers: contingency and necessity. A proposition is necessarily true if it is true in 'all possible worlds' – if there is no possible situation in which it can be false. It is contingent if there are possible worlds where it is false. Logical tautologies (e.g. If P and Q, then P) and truths of mathematics (e.g. 1+2=3) are examples of necessary truths. Empirical facts (e.g. the Earth is the third planet from the sun; the dinosaurs were made extinct by the effects of an asteroid strike) are contingent, because there are possible (counterfactual) worlds where these are false. There is a close connection between these and the Kantian categories. Generally a posteriori propositions are contingent propositions, and often called empirical propositions. Alternatively, a priori propositions are necessary propositions and are called non-empirical. Although the classes may be co-extensive, the concepts are distinct however. E.g. contingency refers to a concept of possibility (a modal concept), while a posteriori refers to a concept of epistemology (how a proposition is known). (In Kantian terms, the claim that a posteriori propositions are contingent propositions would itself be a synthetic a priori proposition.) Most important, there are multiple concepts of necessity and possibility. For logicians, logical necessity is the central concept, but in science, nomic necessity is paramount. 'Nomically necessary' just means 'entailed by the laws of nature'. Fundamental physics and some other theoretical sciences are attempts not merely to record facts, or regularities, but to discover principles of nomic 65 necessity, to discover laws of nature. Of course it is a metaphysical claim that there is such a thing, and even more contentious that we can determine it. It is also generally assumed that nomic necessity is itself logically contingent. This means the laws of nature can only be established empirically, not deduced by reason alone. Here we begin to get into the twilight zone of metaphysics – in this case, the metaphysics of empiricism. For this is now a metaclaim about the nature of scientific knowledge itself, not a scientific claim per se. Empiricists of course want to deny that there is significant metaphysical knowledge – but what is the status of that claim? Most attempts to state such claims are prone to internal logical contradictions – e.g. see Appendix 5. The main modern technical tool for reasoning about these concepts is called possible world theory. Because this is central to modern metaphysics, but practically unknown outside a small group of philosophers, I present some details in Appendix 6. It is the only way presently known to philosophers to make many fundamental metaphysical and semantic disputes clearer. Having clarified some basic concepts of philosophy that often cause confusion, I now return to the main stream of the discussion. The ether: an exception in López Corredoira's examples. Now I have left out one of López Corredoira's examples of "wrong scientific ideas", viz. the proposal of an 'ether'. Unlike orthodox physicists, I do not think there is conclusive proof that this is wrong at all. There are a number of reasons. It can be a little vague what an 'ether' is, but I will take it as equivalent to the claim that there are absolute facts about spatial position. This is also equivalent to saying there are facts about absolute velocity w.r.t. space, rather than merely relative velocities of objects w.r.t. each other, as claimed in Special Relativity. Now practically every text-book on mechanics and every popular presentation of physics tells us that motion is relative, and that this was proved by the Special Theory of Relativity. How could this possibly be wrong if all these scientific experts agree on it? Here are nine possible reasons: (1) The Special Theory of Relativity is empirically wrong and incomplete. (2) The interpretation of STR is conceptually wrong. (3) The CMBR defines a unique universal stationary frame for the universe. (4) A closed curved universe typically requires a unique frame of reference for its consistent global description of space. (5) Quantum wave collapse is super-luminal and thus requires an absolute frame. 66 (6) The phenomenon that would be causally explained by an ether is not causally explained by any other theory – merely postulated as a fact. (7) Time flow (implying an absolute frame of simultaneity, and absolute distinction of past, present and future) is real, and combined with the empirical content of relativity theory, this forces an absolute frame for space. (8) A higher-dimensional theory of space forces a closed finite local boundary, and this is equivalent to an absolute space or "ether". (9) There is something fundamentally wrong with the two partial theories of QM and GTR, and when they are unified, the resulting theory may result in surprising and unforeseen consequences, which may require the reinstatement of an absolute space or "ether". How plausible are these possibilities really? Well, they are all plausible. They are not just academic possibilities. For instance, the first one is true. STR postulates a flat space-time metric, and this is explicitly contradicted by GTR, which entails a curved space-time metric. STR is empirically false, and strictly speaking, no inferences from STR are sound (since the premise is false). I will not go through all of these here: rather, the point is that I believe there is ample room for real doubt in this case. Why? Because, unlike phlogiston, the explanations in this area are still not stable scientific truths. The foundational theory of physics (in the opinion of other physicists too) is still prone to revolutionary change. The phenomenon the "ether" was meant to explain still have no conclusive causal explanations, and if the whole framework of relativity theory is disrupted, who knows what might eventuate. Now López Corredoira might say: "Yes it is academically possible, perhaps, but I still think it is highly unlikely". Fair enough. That is his intuition. We all have our intuitions. We can only state things as we see them. But with heterodox views in physics, we are talking exactly about the fact that certain possibilities remain open despite strong orthodox intuitions to the contrary. López Corredoira is a tolerant person and would likely say: "Well if you have strong arguments about such a thing, then by all means go ahead and investigate it. It is your time and effort after all." But most orthodox scientists are the opposite. They will say: "I do not want your silly ideas corrupting my science!". And if a suspicion of real doubt creeps in, their inner voice will shout: "... this heterodoxy would be a disaster for me if anything comes of it ... it will undermine my prestige ... people will question my work ... this must not be taken seriously ... at least until after my retirement ... ". What is the real subject of their science? The personal pronoun? About phlogiston, I don't think there is any plausible scientific doubt it is wrong. It has indeed become a trivial historical example. But what about 67 when we encounter more realistic heterodox beliefs – for example, closely connected to the ether example, the proposition that there may be an absolute frame of simultaneity for time, and hence, an absolute frame of rest for space? Who is going to judge such cases? Remember López Corredoira used the ether as an example that he believes is effectively beyond question. López Corredoira emphasises that such cases of heterodox theories exist – otherwise successful heterodox science, or revolutionary science, is not possible. Because he is relatively more conservative than I am about fundamental physics, or at least about relativity theory , he sees the plausible limits of heterodoxy as more limited than I do. Most orthodox physicists are far more dogmatically conservative than either of us. So again: who is going to judge such cases? What methodological principles can we use to make our pre-scientific judgements of plausibility? I do not think there are any such principles, certainly none in the practise of science. In practise today, it is left to the raw power-struggle between individuals and ideological cliques: the law of the jungle. If we do not want to live by the law of the jungle, we must instead have some principles of tolerance for ideas and beliefs of others that we do not believe in ourselves. The power brokers of modern science lack such tolerance. They wish to destroy the natural diversity of ideas, just as cultural supremacists wish to destroy the natural diversity of cultures. Heterodox water science. I mention another real recent example – an especially vivid one among a number of possible examples from recent science. I agree with the phlogiston example, that conventional chemistry has explained the phenomenon of burning adequately and robustly enough to rule out phlogiston. But how robust is conventional chemistry in general, really? What about, for instance, the theory of Brownian motion, osmosis, capillary transport, the structure of liquid water, the formation of clouds, the process of freezing, and other such common phenomenon involving water? Now the modern theories of these subjects are about 100 years old. Water, you would think, has been intensively investigated to death. If science has any claim to produce certain and stable knowledge, it should surely be written in an area such as this. And yet a revolutionary theory of water appeared in 2013 that contradicts orthodox theories on so many fundamental points it is shocking. Gerald Pollack's The Fourth Phase of Water makes astonishing claims in the context of orthodox water science – backed up by careful, replicated experiments, and many references to other heterodox and marginalised scientists. There have been many water scientists who have discovered various of these anomalous phenomenon over the decades, and advanced 68 alternative theories about water, and been professionally destroyed for their trouble. Pollack is not some marginal heterodox 'crackpot' – heterodox certainly, but he is an eminent, award-winning professor from Washington State University in Seattle, with numerous publications and his own research laboratory. He has multiple empirical demonstrations that liquid water takes on a quasi-crystalline structure, a 'fourth phase', in certain common conditions, and this state is the essential cause of numerous phenomenon, including Brownian motion, capillary action, osmosis, freezing, and many others. These are phenomenon that were assumed to have good scientific explanations already, for decades. See (Pollack, 2013, Preface, Section 1) for some account of the controversial history behind this too. I pose this as a real, recent, highly surprising example of revolutionary science. If Pollack is right, then many basic explanations given in orthodox water science, as taught for decades in high schools and universities, are fundamentally wrong; and moreover, the science has been paralysed by dogmatic intolerance – and quite deliberately so, for personal and political motives. For a personal connection to this subject, in 2014 I became intrigued by these claims, including a related controversy over effects of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation treatment of water, which specifically goes back to a controversy over 'magnetic water memory' that started in the 1990's. Such claims are widely dismissed as 'bunk', 'crackpot', 'pseudo-science' by establishment scientists today. It is widely claimed by the 'sceptic' community that any such effects are quite impossible on the basis of known physics. (They are driven by enmity to 'alternative' health movements, fearing such results will legitimise enemies there). But the 'scientific literature' is so contradictory, polarised and biased between opposing views, that I finally decided the only way to make any realistic judgement would be to test the claim myself. I spent about three months doing a simple experiment that involved reviving about 1500 pairs of wilted dandelions in EM water treatments, to see if there are detectable effects on the speed of revival. Revival of wilted flowers involves water transport through the vascular system, and osmosis into dehydrated cells. I found strong effects on revival times, and conclude that radio frequency EM treatment of water has very distinct effects on properties of water, lasting for at least several hours. See: (WEBREF Holster (a)) for a report of the experiment and (WEBREF Holster (b)) for an account of some recent controversy. An example of results is shown in the graph insert below, comparing treated and untreated samples. I have little doubt that the EM treatment in suitable conditions has a major effects on water transport properties. 69 Experiment 2. Light, Medium and Severe Wilting. 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 1 10 19 28 37 46 55 64 73 82 91 10 0 10 9 11 8 12 7 13 6 14 5 15 4 16 3 17 2 18 1 19 0 19 9 20 8 21 7 Individual stems, ordered by revival time R ev iv al ti m e (m in s) A Treated Time: BORE + GRIT : VA BOTH B Untreated Time: BORE + GRIT : No VA That such a simple amateur experiment can empirically contradict the theoretically based opinion of orthodox scientists on the subject is a big red flashing light: the 'orthodox scientific view' has been formulated from theoretical beliefs, and lacks basic empirical verification. The familiar scientistic propaganda claiming that science is evidence-based – that scientists are constantly testing their claims beyond reasonable doubt is starkly contradicted. Scientific claims are usually based on authority. In case the reader is sceptical about this, it also recently came to light that this low-energy radio frequency treatment allows salt water to burn – apparently releasing sufficient amounts of hydrogen to create a steady flame. The EM treatment appears to cause dissociation of H2O into hydrogen and oxygen – only the second method discovered, the first being by applying electric voltage, discovered some 180-odd years earlier. " Faraday in 1831 first established that water could be dissociated in a DC electric field with hydrogen emitted at the cathode and oxygen at the anode. To the best of the authors' knowledge, besides the use of the electric field current in some form, no other vectors have been found to dissociate liquid water into hydrogen and oxygen near room temperature. The use of weak electromagnetic radiation to completely dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen is, therefore, the key innovation discovered by Kanzius." Roy et alia, 2008, p.5. The fact this effect was not noticed until the C21st should be a scientific scandal! It also reinforces questions raised about effects of EM radiation on health. Our brains and organs are now exposed to low-energy amplitudemodulated radiation from many common electrical devices: how do we know it is safe? The main scientific argument is that the EM energy is too low to have any effects. But this argument now appears to be false. Heterodox brain science. I briefly relate a second example that I think is of personal interest to many people, especially those who have had multiple hangovers, watched a lot of daytime tv, or spent a long time in management meetings, and may be concerned that an excessive number of their neurons have perished as a result, never to be replaced. From at least the 1970's it was widely touted as scientific fact that all organs regenerate cells, except neurons in the brain. Your quota of neurons, the story went, is fixed once your brain has developed its full quota (apparently by very early childhood), and your neuron count is all downhill after that. As a young student I found this concerning; having also seen alarming estimates of the number of brain cells killed per glass of beer. I also found it odd, but I accepted it implicitly because it was repeated with 70 such scientific authority. More exactly, the claim was that the brain does not produce new neurons; and even when that began to be overthrown from the late 1990's, the claim that the human brain has no neural stem cell pathway, no way to deliver new cells to brain areas needing repair. But this has recently been dispelled as a scientific myth – after some half a century as a widely popularised Modern Science Fact. Recently Professor Richard Faull and his small research team at the University of Auckland, in collaboration with Professor Peter Eriksson and his team at the Arvid Carlsson Institute for Neuroscience, in Gothenburg, Sweden, showed that the human brain does have a pathway to deliver neural stem cells – the Rostral Migratory Pathway. This was a scientific heresy in 2007 when they submitted their findings, based on eight years of careful research, to Nature. Their landmark paper was rejected by the peer reviewers, leading authorities in brain research, who maintained this was impossible. Eventually it was accepted by Science, making the front cover (Faull et alia, 2007). What seems especially peculiar is that it was already accepted at this stage that other mammals, like rats, have a distinct pathway for neural stem cells: the human brain was considered a unique exception! Faull and his team found that the same pathway also exists in humans; it has simply been distorted a little as the brain has evolved and enlarged. It seems the longstanding myth never had any real scientific evidence in the first place. Yet many scientific experts refused to contemplate that their long-standing myth could be wrong when presented with real evidence. This kind of dogmatism, I would say, is the typical behaviour of real scientists. The fact our brain can regenerate neurons is a result that I find personally comforting, and I expect some readers will too. But the main point is that this example shows that a small team working at an obscure university even in sleepy NZ can still make radical discoveries that overthrow the orthodoxy of powerful scientific gatekeepers at prestigious international institutions. It may be hard to get such heterodox discoveries past the gatekeepers; but radical discoveries still remain to be made. This example is also interesting to me from another vantage. Brain science has a huge theoretical gap, in that there is no network model to understand the logic of neuronal wiring. There is no 'wiring model' of how neurons, which are highly interconnected, logically represent information. At least, there is no model that I am aware of. Computational scientists have long assumed that the logic of information representation in the brain will follow a digital programming logic. The simplistic assumption is that it will map to some equivalent of the Boolean logic of computer circuits. This assumption is seen repeatedly in academic discussions of artificial intelligence - "once we map the neurons of a human brain into a digital computer simulation, the computer will become intelligent and conscious in the same way as the human". 71 I sincerely doubt this is any more possible than flying pigs. There are many possible information coding methods beyond the simplistic Boolean logic of a digital computer. 'Quantum logic', using entangled quantum states, is one example of a fundamentally different kind of representational method – and proven to work technologically in the last few years. But there remains a longstanding assumption among materialists that the human brain is functionally equivalent to a classical digital computer representing a Universal Turning Machine. Turing and von Neumann were influential in establishing this idea in the early period of digital computer development, in the 1940s and '50s. This paradigm has lasted about three academic generations purely on the basis of flimsy a priori assumptions, without a shred of scientific evidence. I have come to think instead that the logical representation of information in natural systems will have a quite distinctive functional network model, based on a specific kind of lattice-like network, built on a specific type of recursive mosaic element. I have found this structure acts as a generalised information model – and one that precisely reflects Tichy's theory of recursive logical constructions. As far as I know, this kind of formal network structure, although ideal for representing Tichy's higher-level logic, and thus natural language capability, has not been considered before, either in information theory or brain science. Indeed the possibility is presently beyond the imagination of experts in these fields, because they have not yet stumbled upon the paradigmatic network model required. The Faull discovery confirms suspicions that despite impressive brain scanning technology and such like, brain science is still very primitive. I am sure there is a real possibility that such alternative network models are viable. I think progress will be limited until some such theoretical model is established. This also illustrates an important point about drawbacks of scientific specialisation. Such network models can be conceived as abstract structures by mathematical logicians. Information theory and brain science are driven in their different ways by applied scientists (computer scientists, neuroscientists), with only a limited vocabulary of such models to bring to the party. Few genuine mathematical logicians will cross the boundaries into these disciplines – and few computer scientists or brain scientists will learn the advanced mathematical logics required. An outsider proposing a novel underlying mathematical model will have great difficulty being taken seriously in such subjects. Professional opposition to outsiders crossing boundaries of specialisations is one of the defining features of modern science, and one of the most powerful forces against heterodox thinkers. But combining insights from multiple fields is often the essential ingredient for making progress. In any event, brain science, cognitive science and information science are still in their infancy, and there will be major theoretical revolutions – and philosophical revelations before good, stable scientific explanations of 72 cognitive abilities can be claimed in these fields. This is a huge area of real importance and interest for the immediate future. The prospect of revolutionary science. Pollack of 'exclusion zone water' fame has also started an Institute for Venture Science (WEBREF), specifically to fund high-risk, revolutionary research proposals. He has a simple, sensible, and clearly stated practical philosophy in place for his own research laboratory. But most important, he has the conviction that revolutionary scientific ideas remain a realistic prospect. By contrast, I think López Corredoira's suggestions that most scientific gold in the natural sciences has been mined, and there is not much of real significance left to find, is too conservative. The example of a new age of water science is a striking example, and I think that foundational science in many domains is far more dubious than orthodox scientists generally think is possible. This is especially true of foundational physics, which prescribes a framework of possibilities for other natural sciences. The situation to my mind is now very similar to that at the end of the C19th, when classical physics appeared to most scientists as the fundamentally correct foundational theory of nature. Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest scientists of the final era of classical physics, is often mistakenly quoted as declaring foundational physics to be settled in the 1880's. This is unsubstantiated, but other physicists, like Michelson, made such declarations, and it was a common article of faith in the final phase of classical mechanics that the classical foundation for physics was final and irrevocable. In the same period, similar sentiments were expressed that mathematics was effectively complete, and others thought that all useful technology had been invented, and suggested closing patent offices. How wrong can you be? These sentiments were expressed by leading scientists of the day. We might think this view was justified at the time, but closer inspection shows that such opinions were completely unfounded on the basis of available evidence. By the 1890's, classical physics was fraught with unresolved anomalies, and classical physics actually left the vast bulk of familiar phenomenon without any real explanation – it left almost every detail of atomic structure and chemistry, optics, electromagnetism, astronomy and cosmology unexplained. Science in 1890 was profoundly ignorant of practically everything we would come to take for granted over succeeding decades – including electrons, protons and neutrons, sub-atomic structure, Plank's constant h and quantum theory, radioactivity, relativity theory, the strong and weak nuclear forces (two of only four fundamental forces known today), the energy source of stars, the existence of galaxies, the expanding universe and Big Bang cosmology, the vast bulk of modern medical science, the vast bulk of cellular 73 biology and genetics, the vast bulk of chemistry and materials science, tectonic plate theory and continental drift, geological processes and the internal structure and age of the Earth, genetics and detailed mechanisms of evolution; the list goes on indefinitely. We easily forget how recent all the major discoveries of science are. How could the late-C19th scientists be so wrong – and so blind to the glaring gaps in their account of nature? It is partly because of a mistaken arrogance, found in all ages of modern scientific culture, that we now represent the most sophisticated culmination of knowledge in history. It is also because of a particular arrogance among physicists about the finality of foundational theories of physics. Scientists had developed a powerful belief in classical physics as the foundational framework, translated into a misguided dogma that all phenomenon must ultimately be explained in such terms as classical atoms interacting through classical forces in classical space and time. Shortly afterwards, physics began on the path to a profound revolution. This was advanced by a tiny group of heterodox physicists, resisted by the orthodox professors of the time. My view, that science is far more vulnerable to revolutionary change today than orthodox scientists think, is partly because I believe foundational physics of our day is overdue for another fundamental revolution. Its vastly overcomplicated and paradoxical theoretical superstructure will collapse, and be replaced by a radically different conception of nature as a whole. It is also partly because I believe that the simplistic materialist 'scientific world view', which still dominates the scientific imagination in the same form as it did at the end of the C19th, is radically wrong as a vision of nature and certainly wrong as a vision of scientific method. It is based on a simplistic idea of the part-whole structure of objects, and a simplistic idea of the causal connectivity found in nature. The materialist paradigm explains nothing about mind and consciousness, and yet these are intrinsic to the natural world. An account of nature that leaves them out cannot be taken seriously as a basis for a comprehensive metaphysical belief system, such as ideological materialists prescribe. I believe science must undergo a radical transformation to incorporate mind into its theories. When scientists are forced to look again at the real world, instead of at their text-books, they will find that what they thought was a mechanical world is really more like a magic reality. In fact, a transformation of scientific metaphysics has already begun, through quantum mechanics. QM shows the world is interrelated in ways that are commonly described by leading physicists as 'weird', 'magical', 'spooky', or simply incomprehensible. This 'weirdness' has led to numerous conflicting interpretations of what quantum mechanics means – what it implies about the nature of reality. Some interpretations are metaphysically very radical. The best example is Everett's 'many worlds' quantum theory, which holds that the world continuously divides into an infinity of different 74 realities, and that everything physically possible happens in some world. There is no longer a single actual world being realised from among the host of possible futures: every possible future relative to our present state will happen. The division of worlds happens every time a microscopic probabilistic quantum event – a 'collapse of the wave function' – occurs. This is one of the most radical metaphysical visions ever seriously contemplated in science or philosophy. Nonetheless it is a brilliant piece of creative scientific speculation, and is taken very seriously by many physicists. But it sparks strong emotions, and most physicists today would still scoff at it (as if they personally know the answers to these controversies that the leading specialists admit to being baffled by). Its initial reception in physics was scorn by the dominant Positivists, and it took some decades to achieve any recognition. But whatever the resolution turns out to be, quantum mechanics shows empirically and theoretically that the physical universe is far weirder than 'scientific common sense' of today can imagine. What practically every specialist in the field agrees on is that quantum mechanics cannot be simply reconciled with our 'common sense' vision of classical materialist reductionism. Yet the latter persists as the archetypal metaphysical vision among the large majority of scientific materialists. Equally, attempts to reconcile quantum theory with relativity theory have led thousands of leading mathematical physicists to believe in string theory, which postulates that physical space has nine or ten dimensions, instead of just the three dimensions we see. It must be emphasised that string theory is only a mathematical speculation, not an empirical theory of physics. It has no empirical evidence, and it has appeared for many years now to be a failed research program. Nonetheless it is a profound idea, and the prospect that space is multi-dimensional must be taken seriously. The failure of string theory may give multi-dimensional space a bad reputation – especially because string theorists themselves dogmatically maintain their theory is only realistic possibility of this kind. But there are many other possibilities for a hyper-dimensional model of the universe, overlooked because of string theory and I believe many features of modern physics indicate that the dimensionality of space must be generalised. Again physicists have strong personal opinions on this subject. Personally I think it would be very surprising if space turned out to be only three dimensional, as it appears to us phenomenologically just as it would have been very surprising if the phenomenal material substances (like stone, wood, water, snow, clouds, air, blood, flesh, leaves, gold, copper, iron, etc) that appear as natural categories to our senses, had turned out to be the fundamental types of matter. I do not believe in string theory, but I think that space is multi-dimensional, and this will be the most radical scientific revolution of all time, because we will discover there is far more of the structure of the universe hidden in the hyper-dimensions than revealed to 75 our senses or to reductionist physics. Just as microscopes revealed an astonishing world of structure in the realm of the very small, crawling with microscopic life, eventually fundamental physics will reveal an equally astonishing structure in other dimensions of space, rich with order and information. And I believe this must be central to consciousness too; showing that the present materialistic paradigm is as misguided as classical atomism was. Because of the number of severe and unexplained anomalies in modern physics and cosmology, foundational physics is open to revolutionary change. Indeed, I believe it would have gone through such a revolution over the last few decades, were it not for the severe repression of ideas in modern physics. And any such revolution will deeply affect other natural sciences, including theories of mind. Yet while I believe a revolution is immanent, I also think it is unlikely to be made through our present scientific institutions. It will be made by outsiders. The new approach required to advance physics will be attacked from within conventional physics, because it has to revolutionise certain foundational concepts of quantum theory and relativity theory, but this goes profoundly against the interests of professional physicists. Having painted themselves into a corner, prominent scientists cannot emotionally afford to allow new ideas they have ridiculed to be recognised. They have too much to lose personally. And this brings us to the second crux of the problem. Scientists typically complain of the bureaucratisation of their subject, and of attacks on science by forces of 'pseudo-science' and anti-scientific culture from outside. But the greatest enemy of science is from within: the bigotry and mediocrity in the professional culture of science. The scope of science. One important subject that López Corredoira does not talk about much is the scope of science: the different kinds of sciences, the different roles and functions of science. He focuses mainly on pure sciences, using physical or natural sciences (physics, astronomy, biology) as core examples. He is most concerned at how the bastions of pure science have been corrupted, in spirit and practice. But the vastly expanded scope of science in the modern world is central to understanding its death-spiral into mediocrity, and the corruption of its values and quality. I briefly talk about this as part of the broader social context. Science like art has a number of different functions, and is seen in quite different ways by different people and in different sub-cultures. As broad categories we can identify the following. 76 (i) The non-scientific public including corporate executives and government bureaucrats, financiers and politicians, the sub-cultures of power, business and finance – have little knowledge of science, and see it in a cartoon-like image as technology. (ii) Applied scientists usually see its function as accumulating factual knowledge in their specialist domains, providing an authoritative system of proven beliefs, and enabling technologies. (iii) 'Pure scientists' in more abstract fields, notably theoretical physicists and cosmology, as well as some chemists, evolutionists and microbiologists, often see its function as discovering knowledge of 'fundamental natural laws', describing the 'essence of physical reality', including the nature of life. But specialist researchers in the pure and applied sciences rarely work on anything outside their own specialisations, and often take their own field as representative of the scientific model. They often deprecate other fields of science. (iv) Generalist science teachers and educators usually have broader views, presenting science as a general method of enquiry, that can be adapted to multiple fields of knowledge. But they teach from textbooks, rely on scientific authority, and usually have little first-hand experience of scientific research or discovery. Thus while they emphasise the source of scientific belief as experiment and observation, they are prone to actually teaching science in a dogmatised fashion, as a set of established scientific facts within a curriculum. Of course students in science classes are rarely actually doing science, they are learning what has been done before. (v) Scientistic propagandists are a special prominent group today, preaching 'science' as the final and ultimate form of knowledge, and seeking to replace philosophy, metaphysics, religion, and other traditional systems of meaning, with their own brand of 'scientific metaphysics', combining materialism, reductionism, positivism, nihilism, atheism and an intellectual elitism. They have gained the central power within scientific culture over recent decades, and now have unprecedented influence over the presentation of science, proliferating books, documentaries, magazines, journalism and internet blogs. (vi) Most other intellectuals, outside science – writers, dramatists, artists, anthropologists, social and political philosophers, political economists, historians, educationalists, journalists, moral philosophers, metaphysical philosophers, theologians, social activists, psychologists, spiritualists see science as having a limited sphere of validity. Most feel naturalistic science has little to say directly about larger questions of morality, value, political 77 organisation, economics, social justice, art and aesthetics, spirituality and meaning. Many today have become negative about science. Many ordinary people today also see science negatively, as a set of dogmas preached by elitist academics, and used to attack their own social, moral, religious or spiritual beliefs. Thus there is a wide spectrum of beliefs about what science is and what it means – and not just by the general public, but in different scientific and intellectual sub-cultures. Science as technology is of course the stereotypical image in our culture. Think of all those TV ads for toothpaste, cars, tyres, breakfast cereals, painkillers ... with people in white laboratory coats representing Scientific Authority. Science is often proclaimed as the modern cornucopia, giving us all sorts of consumer goodies, medical technologies, weapon technologies, etc. That is the function that makes sense of science to bureaucrats and executives and marketers. After all, if science doesn't give us new technology to increase production, new power to dominate nature, new ways to increase consumption, then how is it going to make money or enhance power? And if it doesn't make money or power, what value could it possibly have? "What is it going to do for me?" is what people in our modern ego-centred culture instinctively ask. Few people are really interested in knowledge for its own sake: most are satisfied they already understand the nature of the world perfectly well without reference to science. For most, it is not science but social ideologies that define their meaning and values and importance. The rich and powerful also resent the potential of science to question their beliefs, which are already fixed to their satisfaction, and see it primarily as a technology factory, enhancing their material wealth or power. But of course that is a purely exploitative materialistic view of science. It ignores the real transformational power of knowledge. This modern corruption of science to a technology slave already sounds alarm-bells. Roman civilisation gives us a powerful image of the dead-end of technology when it is isolated from 'pure science'. The Romans inherited science and natural philosophy from the Greeks (and other cultures). They established a technological civilisation of great power from this, with an Empire based on bureaucracy, law and order, material comfort and military security. But they failed to develop pure science – or natural philosophy – any further, and that fundamentally limited their technology. They were on the cusp of developing modern science, with its advanced technology of complex machinery, steam power, metallurgy, electricity, crop science, medicines, etc, but they failed to take the opportunity. Their materialistic, hedonistic, militaristic, technocratic culture killed openness to intellectual discovery, as exemplified by the Classical Greeks. The Romans thought they knew it all already. They came to exemplify an extreme and fatal arrogance. 78 Our own materialistic culture, the global syndrome of the modern West, resembles the Roman arrogance. Technology is enabled by pure science, as the by-product of intellectual discovery: the result of a deeper understanding of causality. The deeper technological implications are rarely envisioned when new science is being discovered. For the most iconic example of our time, atomic weapons of mass destruction, developed in the 1940's by the US, were enabled in theory by the abstract relationship we know as: E=mc2, first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1889, and famously established as a general law of physics by Einstein in 1905. But for the next three decades after this equivalence of mass and energy was established, no one dreamed that the energy locked up in fundamental particle masses could be harnessed to create the most destructive weapons in history. The same is true of every major branch of pure science: physics, chemistry, geology, biology, genetics, and so on. They all began as discoveries of abstract knowledge, long before their insights gave rise to practical technologies. Science starts with the development of knowledge, understanding, comprehension, insight, explanation – ephemeral and unquantifiable goods. Such knowledge provides a platform to understand the deeper possibilities inherent in nature, leading to a new mastery of cause and effect, which can be exploited for practical goals. But pure science rarely originates as technology goals. For discoveries about the possibilities inherent in nature cannot be prescribed, like product developments. You can demand that your technologists (using their scientific training and scientific knowledge) develop a more powerful bomb, a new vaccine, or find a way to reduce cattle flatulence (a top priority scientific project in NZ). But they have to start from a place defined by present science. You can't demand that your scientists develop an antigravity compound, or find a new fundamental force, or create a new form of energy any more than you can demand that your explorers discover a new continent. You can only discover what the fundamental forces are, you can't develop new ones. You might discover an 'anti-gravity compound', but only if the possibility for such a thing actually exists in nature – which on the basis of present fundamental physics is unlikely – but who knows what will happen in a new unified theory? But in any case, you are not going to develop such a thing directly from a 'technology project' – there is only a potential to discover it indirectly, by first discovering a deeper set of natural laws than we presently know. When the function of developing knowledge is overridden by the function of developing products for money and power, the ideal of science as knowledge is lost, and the organisation of scientific research is lobotomised. This is the reality today. Modern bureaucracy, politics and business controls the funding and goals of science, and the arrogance and ignorance of authorities in these 79 domains is partly responsible for the decline of science as a form of knowledge. But that is hardly news: every genuine scientist of every era has probably lamented this corruption; and a significant number of executives and politicians and bureaucrats also understand the importance of pure science as a form of knowledge, too. Pure science today commands huge resources, in name at least. Not everyone is so crass as to think science is purely utilitarian. Science has had many benefactors from business tycoons, aristocrats, and politicians in the past and present. The utilitarian force for the corruption of science has always been with us, but science has survived for three hundred years in the present era. What is fatal today is the combination of such forces with the corruption of pure science from within its own ranks: its corruption as an open domain of knowledge by the scientific community itself. When we consider the most central function of science, as a domain of knowledge, the striking feature is its vast expansion over the last century. From roughly the start of the C20th, core natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, geology) expanded to take in social sciences, political sciences, psychological sciences, anthropological sciences, business sciences, computer sciences, information sciences, sports sciences, media sciences ... By the mid-twentieth century, it seemed that every domain of human activity could be turned into a 'science'. This also reflects the idea that science is not limited to a naturalistic subject matter, but is characterised by a generic method of investigating and organising knowledge. Natural sciences led the way, but soon any systematic and methodical investigation into any subject became claimed as a 'science'. Thus we now have 'sciences' of sports, war, law, business, farming, marketing, politicking, sales, management, and everything else under the sun. We must wonder whether this generic extension of science to cover every activity is realistic. Is there really a 'science of management'? Or a 'science of business'? Or a 'science of war'? Certainly there are principles and techniques that can improve our performance in these areas. But how does that count as science? Indeed, are the 'social sciences' really science? 'Political science'? 'Economic science'? 'Sociology'? 'History'? Their methods are very different to the natural sciences. They are similar up to a point: they set up systems of technical concepts, and sometimes attempt to make models, and try to measure some things. But does that make them 'sciences'? The big difference with the natural sciences is that their subject matter is itself a result of human artifice: they describe systems of human organisation, cultural constructions and ideologies, deliberately created by conventions of law and social agreement, and varying from culture to culture. Are there really 'scientific generalisations' or 'laws' about such things? Well, the 'social sciences' so far are very unsuccessful in producing theories of any predictive or explanatory power. They lack causal explanations, and they lack clear ontologies (models; systems of theoretical entities). Theories 80 of social science or business or economics are intimately tied up with ideologies or 'philosophies', with social interpretation. How exactly is 'political science', for example, separable from 'political philosophy' or 'political history'? How do historical explanations, which appeal to motives and goals and intentions behind human actions, count as scientific explanations? Where are the counterfactually valid causal laws of history, sociology, economics? Such laws really don't exist. Once we go outside the core natural sciences, and into social sciences, what we have are culturally relative frameworks for the description and interpretation of complex high-level systems of behaviour. Of course these subjects can benefit by an application of scientific discipline, but that doesn't make them into 'sciences'. Rather, they use some 'scientific' techniques, but their central modes of thought are not 'scientific' in the normal sense: for the subjective realities they deal with cannot be 'scientifically' objectified. This is not to say that subjective realities cannot have objective descriptions – of course they can – cognitive psychology is about such things. Rather, what is important and meaningful to us in these domains are interpretations and judgements based intrinsically on subjective points of view – subjective human points of view. By the mid-C20th, it became a fad to call every realm of interest a 'science', but it is misleading. All the 'social sciences' require judgement of values and ideologies and psychology; subjective interpretations through our empathic understanding of human motives and behaviours; teleological explanations in terms of goals and aims. They are closer in many respects to literary interpretation or historical interpretation than to the natural sciences. Indeed, the best work in 'sociology' to my mind is presented through novels and drama. I feel that good social novels give me a better intellectual understanding of past culture and society than practically all the millions of academic papers churned out as 'sociological research' in conformity to a fake quasi-scientific tradition. Over the first half of the C20th, science become a victim of its own popular success – or its own propaganda. It had grown in popular credibility over the previous century to become a positive term for a progressive system of knowledge that was carefully worked out, and systematically verified by experts, and so on. The function of the modern Oracle. Science became very much the authority against superstition and bigotry. It became a force for enlightened civilisation, for progress. But it overreached itself, and the scientific outlook, where science informed popular opinion about social, medical and technological issues soon enough turned into the scientistic world view, where scientific opinion is used to prescribe beliefs about the nature of reality, meaning and purpose, taking over the role of philosophy, mythology and religion of past eras. Instead of remaining a specialist sphere of human activity, suited primarily to studying objective questions about 81 nature, and informing social debate with reason and evidence, it turned into an ideology of its own, as its proponents began to claim the 'scientific method' as the only legitimate method of obtaining knowledge about anything. We can see two major effects in the second half of the C20th. First, the sheer proliferation of 'sciences' and expansion of the 'scientific professions' led to a mechanical specialisation into trivialities for their own sake, and a degradation of intellectual quality – the kinds of degradation that López Corredoira describes. It is as if we expanded the number of professional athletes from a few thousand to a few million – and paid them all comfortable salaries, regardless of their performance. Or likewise with musical composers, or artists – domains with critical performance quality, where a few gifted persons clearly outshine everyone else in quality. What would be the result of rampant proliferation of these fields? Severe decline in quality of course. This decline of quality is fatal for science. Universities and research institutes are now swamped with incompetent academics who en masse destroy quality. Science and academia in general today is dominated by the equivalent of karaoke bar singers and Sunday social football players. If you add such people into professional bands or professional football teams, they do not enhance power by adding numbers: they destroy quality. Likewise the huge amassment of numbers does not add to the creative power of science: it destroys it. Many physical scientists (typically physicists and chemists) also criticise other sciences – economics, social sciences, and the like – as failures of quality. Well, they are failures as pure sciences, if taken on the model of physics – because their subject matter is far more difficult than that of physics. But the same critics also express scientistic sentiments that only the scientific method can provide any valid form of knowledge. So on the one hand, they see social science as the only valid form of knowledge about society – and yet they denigrate the achievements of social science in practice. They are often very mocking about subjects outside their own – they are elitists. They will reject social science as science because of its failure. But this is surely hypocritical. If science provides the valid method for developing knowledge, then why hasn't it worked for social sciences too? If science is meant to be a universal method for successful research, you can't just pick the areas where it has worked and call them 'sciences' and pick the areas where is has failed and call them 'nonsciences'. The scientistic elitists tend to blame researchers in other disciplines, and denigrate their efforts. The problem, they think, is that these other areas attract poor scientists – only their own disciplines, of physics and chemistry, produce the 'intellectual geniuses' of science. But this is nonsense. Economics, social sciences and humanities attract just as much 'intellectual genius' as the pure physical sciences. Given 'economic science' has failed for 100 years, surely we must ask: does the scientific method work? There is no point 82 making the excuse that it wasn't done right. If it doesn't work for human scientists in practice, then it doesn't work. If it doesn't work except in the hands of rare geniuses then how is it a systematic method of enquiry? I turn now to the hypocritical attitude of scientism. Scientific bigotry and the scientistic ideology. A major phenomenon of modern science is the dominance of a popularist scientistic ideology within the scientific professions. The project of expanding 'science' to cover every domain of human activity is reflected in the juvenile ideology that science is the only valid form of knowledge. This gave rise to the distinctly modern 'scientistic world view', based on a prescription of materialism, reductionism, nihilism and atheism as a 'scientific philosophy', and belief that these ideas should also dominate theories of value and ethics, economics and politics, metaphysics and religion – thereby making these subjects 'scientifically valid'. This scientistic ideology has gained increasing popularity within mainstream science today, and combines a number of ideologies – or what may be called secular theologies. One is empiricist epistemology, the banal idea that physical observation, measurement and experiment is the sole basis for real knowledge. A second is materialist reductionism, the idea that the only real things are material, and consequently all domains of enquiry and understanding must be reduced to materialist terms to be meaningful. A third is nihilism, the belief that value, morality, and purpose are subjective illusions, or social conventions, and have no objective reality, as they do not reduce to a material reality. A fourth is atheism, in recent decades expanded into a militant movement, culminating in the 'New Atheist' attack on religions and spiritual beliefs generally. This attitude is expressed in attacks on moral philosophy, metaphysics, religion and spiritual belief in the name of science. These are attacked because they provide competing forms of intellectual authority to materialistic scientism, and encourage realism about mind, value, ethics, morality and purpose in nature. Here we see science flagrantly overreaching itself, and becoming increasingly arrogant, dogmatic and authoritarian. The foundational movements in C20th philosophy of science – logical positivism, empiricism, instrumentalism, behaviourism, reductionism, nihilism, all various forms of anti-realism are central props for the explosion of the scientistic ideology we see today. As apologetics for science, the 'scientific philosophies' provide legitimacy for the increasing arrogance of an authoritarian scientific culture. Thus we see science turn from a legitimate domain of enquiry into nature, and become trapped by a metaphysical ideology: the scientistic world view. This 83 thrives today within scientific institutions – it has become the norm of science educators, journalists, broadcasters and academics. A typical prominent example of this is Leonard Mlodinow, with statements reeking of arrogant condescension like this: "I don't normally quote long-dead physicists, for a couple of reasons. For one, unlike religion, physics doesn't put much weight on authority. Certainly physicists listen carefully to the arguments of brilliant colleagues, but then we check their equations. More important, because science marches forward, every decent physics graduate student today knows far more than Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Planck, Einstein, or any other pioneer of quantum theory ever knew about quantum theory, or any other fundamental theory in physics." Leonard Mlodinow in Mlodinow and Chopra, 2011, P. 98. Mlodinow is an archetype of the extreme 'scientistic evangelist', and his statements here are quite absurd if you stop to think about them for a moment. Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Planck, Einstein were among the most brilliant scientific minds of any age; they discovered and developed the concepts of quantum mechanics for themselves, and they spent their whole lives thinking very deeply about the conceptual problems involved. Einstein et alia are a couple of standard deviations ahead in creative intellect than Mlodinow and his 'decent graduate students': you don't make up that kind of intellectual gulf by any amount of text-book learning! Mlodinow's statement that "every decent physics graduate student today knows far more than Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Planck, Einstein, or any other pioneer of quantum theory ever knew about quantum theory, or any other fundamental theory in physics" seems so ignorant that it is hard to credit. He makes this ridiculous statement because he is imagining physics as a simple accumulation of facts – of scientific truths. He wants to make the point that science progresses, but he lacks the subtlety to articulate it in any reasonable manner, and he lacks the insight and honesty to see that physics has deep conceptual problems. So he ends up making a strident statement denigrating the greatest scientists in the field in trying to claim supremacy for his own knowledge. A recent physics graduate should indeed know more facts about certain things today than scientists 50 years ago – e.g. about the families of subatomic particles, discovered by modern particle accelerators – but this does not constitute knowledge and understanding of the fundamental concepts and conceptual problems that beset theoretical physics today. Most physics graduates have specialised into narrow domains, and remain ignorant of areas outside that; they have spent years memorising 'facts' and rehearsing known solutions to text-book problems in their sub-domains, but they have very little opportunity to contemplate the deep conceptual problems of physics – 84 and especially not if they have teachers like Mlodinow, intolerant of conceptual questions. By the time they become graduates themselves, they have generally had all the intellectual curiosity beaten out them. In reality, Einstein, Schrodinger, et alia – and we can add Paul Dirac and David Bohm as two other pioneers of modern physics who were profound critical thinkers uncovered fundamental conceptual problems in the heart of physics that deeply disturbed them, and remain unsolved. These conceptual problems challenge the positivistic ideology espoused by technocrats like Mlodinow. He wants to discredit their critical and philosophical views as being unworthy of attention because he cannot understand them himself, and these thinkers all became highly critical of the shallow scientific positivism in quantum mechanics that he supports. There are many prominent scientists with the same extreme scientistic attitudes as Mlodinow – Richard Dawkins, Peter Atkins, Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking are prominent examples. They are high priests of 'New Atheism'. These people should be regarded as a disgrace to atheism itself, because they have advanced a false view of science in an attempt to force their own pseudo-religious view on society. It is important to separate religion from science and politics – not to conflate them. This scientistic movement is comparable to the rise of fundamentalist religious ideologies. Scientistic ideology has been deliberately politicised and emotionalised, and reaches its most reactionary form through militant groups like the 'guerrilla sceptics', an intellectual terrorist gang specialising in internet attacks on dissenting thinkers; or in the silliness of the 'Brights', a cringingly geekish atheist club. The scientistic ideology now has huge influence over scientific media, with its language of scientistic faith becoming the editorial stock-in-trade of publications, from popular magazines like Scientific American to serious journals like Nature and Science. You have to speak in the scientistic rap to become the editor of an orthodox science journal today. The leaders of this ideology are notably ignorant of philosophy and history, but they do understand one principle very well: the power of personal ridicule and abuse of opponents as a propaganda weapon. Thus the 'scientific philosophy' that started way back in the Enlightenment as a positive force for realism and sanity, has ended up becoming a self-destructive ideology, a virulent nihilistic metaphysics, led by atheist propagandists. The community of 'scientistic atheists' is philosophically and socially naïve in the extreme – the equivalent of extreme religious fundamentalists on the opposite side of the spectrum. The 'science wars' they have created, of 'science versus religion', does huge damage to the image of science in the general community. This radicalised scientistic movement is now widely popularised through 'sceptic' and 'debunker' communities that spawn across the internet on 'science community sites'. They attract immature science students and immature academics. They 85 worship the authority of science, and their stock insult is to brand opponents as pseudo-scientists, the equivalent of religious blasphemers. This movement is a betrayal of the very spirit of science itself, which originally sought to separate objective and dispassionate evaluation of factual questions about the natural world from emotive and political and metaphysical judgements. The scientistic movements of our day, spawned from within mainstream scientific institutions – by science academics, teachers and philosophers radicalising their students – seeks to emotionalise the debates about philosophical and scientific issues, to demonise their opponents, using a stock vocabulary of contempt and ridicule; the common tricks of political ideology. The rise of modern 'sceptic' groups is a prime example of the power of propaganda. The term 'scepticism' has reversed its traditional meaning, of questioning theories and claims made on the basis of authority, and demanding an evaluation of evidence, and come to mean the opposite: insisting on positive belief in materialism and atheism as ultimate 'scientific truths'. This extends into attacks on any genuinely sceptical heterodox challenges to conventional scientific authority. We now find virulent scientistic dogmatism popularised as 'scepticism' in numerous subjects. Bloggers in this sphere eagerly denounce independent intellectuals as 'pseudo-scientists'. This is their signature phrase: every heterodox idea is attacked as pseudo-science. You only have to sound suggestive of having an open mind about subjects like electromagnetic effects on water , alternative health and medicine, organic farming, alternative archaeology, theories of mind and consciousness, the completeness of evolutionary theory, non-materialist metaphysics, psi phenomenon, nonterrestrial origins of life, ufos and aliens, mysterious creatures like Big Foot, homeopathy, not to mention spirituality, God, religion or mysticism, to be branded as a 'pseudo scientist' and become an object of sceptical contempt. And yet these subjects of attack either lie outside scientific evaluation at all and depend on personal experience and faith – like beliefs in God and spirituality – or they provide challenging examples of perplexing empirical phenomenon that science has been unable to resolve – areas where science has so far failed to establish conclusive explanations or consensus including the explanation of consciousness, esp, psychic phenomenon, NDEs (near death experiences), the origin of life, the existence of aliens. The pathetic quality of sceptic and debunker material is well illustrated by the following extract. 86 New Age Atheism: The New Frontier of Scientific Ideology http://www.ted.com/conversations/16141/new_age_atheism_the_new_front.html There is criteria which one should follow in order to be a neoatheist: *Understanding science, rel igion, supernatural and atheism ~Science is trying to figure out what is true through methods of logic and rationality, while religion does the same thing but through dogmas and old scriptures. ~Supernatural is the silly notion things cannot be explained by science but religion, and sometimes pseudoscience (which is fake science). ~Atheism is the lack of belief in deities ~Religions are the enemy. Buddhism gets a pass because they are hardly a religion more of a philosophy. *Make sure to know prope r arguments to distinguish atheism from religion: ~"So by the lack of belief in God, I have a belief? So my lack of belief in Santa Claus is "Aclausian?" ~"Is being bold, a hairstyle?" ~"The television being off, a channel?" *Check out Dawkins, Rosenberg, Dennet and Harris: ~These guys pave the way for what it is be a rational, logical and non dogmatic person. ~They demonstrate how belief in a God is just nonsensical through s cience! ~They prove logic is EVERYTHING to how to think properly. *Being militant does not mean physical actions ~Only extremist harm others for their beliefs, and since we have none there is no need for violence. ~Never allow 'faith' to be an acceptable reason for the other person to avoid an argu ment. ~Don't be afraid to debate, you are right! Religion is a destructive practice! ~The burden of proof is on those who claim truth! Always keep in mind something a leader of our movement had to say, which proves powerful: That which can be asserte d without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Christopher Hitchens Let's how a strong discussion here on what it REALLY means to be the neo atheist everyone should be! As an active blogger and forum user to discuss new age atheism, there are a couple of websites I can share. Once a week we have a podcast for lectures with live com menting! Join in the movement! Related Talks: Richard Dawkins: Militant atheism Alain de Botton: Atheism Nicholas Lukowiak B e lleville, NJ United States You might think this is just some purile rant by a crackpot science student. But it is a very popular leading conversation piece from TED Conversations – it came up as the third Google search result on 'New Atheism and Science'. This excerpt is representative of the dismal quality of thousands of such 'conversations' carrying on in 'science blogger' forums. These forums have become very popular with science students and academics seeking validation for a belief system. This is also a very mild piece compared to levels of abuse often found on sceptic and debunker sites. The scientistic sentiment dotes on the authority of orthodox materialistic science, and denigrates entire subjects and domains it is prejudiced against. The hit-list of 'pseudo-scientific subjects' is steadily extended, to rule out more 87 and more traditional questions of philosophy, and rule out sceptical doubts about present scientific certainties. Of special interest to me is the encroachment of this kind of ideology into the philosophy of time, one of most poorly understood subjects of modern philosophy, where the central question is about the nature of time flow and temporal directionality. In the philosophy of physics, there are now powerful attempts to denigrate questions about time flow to the status of 'meaningless metaphysics'. Most of the leading authorities from the philosophy of science now ridicule it as a pseudo-scientific concept. The concepts of past, present and future, so deeply embedded in our language, and universal to our experience of existence as temporal, are ridiculed as pseudoscientific and nonsensical by leading physicists and philosophers of science. Beyond any arguments about specific ideas, this is a deep mistake about the nature of science itself. It is not subject matter per se that defines science: it is method and principles. You cannot possibly define science by prescribing subject matter unless you believe science is finished, because new science introduces new subjects and concepts. Science can study false beliefs as well as true ones – being discovered to be false does not turn a theory into 'pseudoscience'. You can do a 'scientific study' of Santa Claus if you want. "Oh that is surely meaningless pseudo-science, everyone knows Santa Claus doesn't exist!" Well, I agree that Santa doesn't exist: and that is the factual conclusion you should reach when you objectively evaluate the evidence. But this conclusion is not 'pseudo-science' – it is a factual claim, just too trivial to count as significant knowledge for adults. And in fact, everyone doesn't know it – there are millions of pre-school children who don't know it. For them, it becomes a serious problem of empirical belief when they come to question it. Indeed, it is an iconic intellectual puzzle for young children in the West. They must engage their rationality to decide what to believe about Santa. More significantly and controversially, you can do a scientific study of esp or psychic phenomenon. A number of serious scientists have. "Oh that is pseudo-science, done by crackpots, everyone knows esp doesn't exist!" the sceptics will angrily retort. Well, first of all, everyone doesn't know that, and the empirical evidence is actually very difficult to judge. It is not a pseudoscientific question: it is a perfectly real question, and one that prima facie should be able to be studied scientifically. "But it is pseudo-science because esp would contradict fundamental physics! It appeals to mystical powers!" cries the sceptic. But that is wrong. As a widely reported empirical phenomenon, esp does not necessarily imply 'mystical powers' at all, any more than consciousness itself does. If the phenomenon of information transfer by esp was strongly empirically verified, many scientists would expect it have a purely naturalistic explanation – they would look for causal connections beyond the normal senses. Of course it would raise questions about the nature of consciousness, and it would encourage some to propose 'mystical' or non88 materialist explanations. But consciousness simply is mysterious anyway; and if esp was validated, finding an explanation would be a genuine challenge to materialist science. A non-materialist explanation may still be causal. The sceptics' claim that esp is impossible because it would 'contradict fundamental physics' is a characteristic fallacy. When exactly did scientists establish that it contradicts fundamental physics? The year 1600? But no scientists had any real idea of what fundamental physics allows as possible at all then. By 1700? But no scientists had any scientific idea of the nature of life then, let alone any idea of the functioning of the brain or consciousness. By 1800? But as well as the previous lack, there was not even a theory of electromagnetism then – Coulomb's description of the static electric force was only a decade old, there was no theory of magnetism, and there was no idea that electromagnetic radiation could be used for communication-at-adistance. By 1900? But no scientists had any idea of quantum theory then, with its strange and 'spooky' effects that are central to every detailed phenomenon of chemistry. By 1950? But there was still no understanding by then of two of the four present fundamental forces, or of quarks, or of the 'Standard Model' of particle physics and forces – how could anyone know if there might be some other fundamental interaction that could be involved in consciousness, and potentially give rise to esp? From our present point of view, no scientist could have realistic arguments to rule out esp on the grounds of fundamental physics until at very least the 1960s-70s. And in fact, fundamental physics is still so incomplete today that it rules out nothing conclusive about the possibility of esp. Indeed, the vast majority of 'sceptics' who would claim esp is ruled out by 'fundamental physics' have no understanding of fundamental physics themselves. This opinion is based purely on science gossip. It is parroting authority. The only meaningful scientific evidence for or against esp has to be direct evidence of phenomenon, such as evidence from replicated scientific attempts to try demonstrate esp effects under controlled conditions. Sceptics typically appeal to 'fundamental facts of physics' to attack threatening concepts, ignoring the scientific principle that empirical evidence of phenomenon has to be more primary than theoretical arguments. Whenever you read claims by sceptics that some phenomenon or other is 'ruled out as impossible by basic physics', you are almost always having the wool pulled over your eyes. The typical contemptuous attitudes towards esp, alternative health, and a host of other scientific border-line subjects, illustrates how a dogmatic bigotry in the name of science, and a hypocritical attitude to scientific principles, has become dominant within mainstream science culture. It also illustrates a culture of extreme judgementalness. 'Sceptics' present it as stupid and despicable to believe in certain concepts – or even to rationally question them or discuss them. By making such claims they back themselves into a corner: 89 when evidence does come to light for various heterodox ideas, as it inevitably does in some cases, those who have ridiculed these ideas cannot allow the evidence to be recognised. Their emotional egos override scientific objectivity. This investment in emotional egocentricity is the primary mechanism behind the abuse of heterodox ideas within conventional science. I think this reflects a general flood of emotionalised judgementality in our society. It reflects the deeply ideological pattern of thinking that has become the norm of our fake modern 'enlightenment'. The C20th was the century of ideology. Political thinking is dominated by ideologies: Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Marxism, Capitalism, Socialism, Individualism, Democratism, Bureaucratism, Conservatism, Liberalism, Globalism, Nationalism, Internationalism, Patriotism, Anarchism, Racism, Feminism, Environmentalism, Egalitarianism, Utilitarianism, Secularism, as well as Atheism and other militant religious fundamentalisms. The list goes on through a host of philosophical ideologies; and we find science deeply infected with Scientism, based on Positivism, Materialism, Physicalism, Empiricism, Inductivism, Nominalism, Verificationalism, Falsificationism, Instrumentalism, Operationalism, Pragmatism, Behaviourism, Logicism, Formalism, Nihilism, Atheism, on one hand; and in various degrees of opposition to these, Realism, Platonism, Rationalism, Kantianism, Intuitionalism, Structuralism, Cultural Relativism, Subjectivism, Idealism, Phenomenalism, Scientific Anarchism, Post-Modernism, Irrationalism, etc. Most ideologies start with some core positive values, and typically as reactions against extremes of other philosophies; they have to provide something positive to get off the ground. But all ideologies are prone to Extremism, to having their positive values corrupted by Fundamentalism, to excessive Literalism, where their core principles are taken as universal laws. It is certainly necessary to appeal to more fundamental principles of one sort or another to counter destructive ideologies. But it is dangerous to use these to create new anti-ideologies, and impose these in turn as foundational moral principles. For all ideologies are prone to abuse. The error lies in thinking that we can rationalise all our judgements and beliefs from fundamental principles – like a logical axiom system. Chess gives a good illustration of the futility of this. The principles or rules of chess are explicit and simple: there are a small number of moves, and an explicit goal. But people are incapable of rationally calculating their best moves in chess, even though they do have such simple principles to start from. We are too limited intellectually. We can rationally calculate one or two, perhaps three or four moves ahead – but it is impossible for us to calculate 10, 20, 30 ... moves ahead, which is what we would need to do to give a rational solution to chess. It has proved exceedingly difficult even to program computers to play chess adequately, despite their vast calculating power. Chess-playing by 90 human beings relies on judgement and intuition. It is not just rational calculation. Some people have a special gift for this. They will always beat people without that gift. Ideological thinking is similarly a drive to reduce individual judgement to calculation from a set of prescribed rules. In public life it is seen in the cult of bureaucracy – the attempt to create totalitarian systems of rules to take over all our decision-making. In scientism it is seen in the cult of a mythological 'scientific method', meant to take over the individual judgement and creativity of gifted intellectuals. Ideological thinking is so deeply embedded in our culture that its unnaturalness has become largely invisible; we now are trained to conform and rationalise our behaviour and feelings to social ideologies throughout our lives. We learn as teenagers that our taste in music or fashion will see us admitted or ostracised from 'in-groups'. Education is insidiously designed to engineer ideological conformity. Television advertising, news and current affairs programs are saturated with ideological messages, overt and subliminal. As adults, political or religious conformities come to replace music and fashion as central to our social identities. The power of this identity can hardly be over-estimated. The result is that people today are extraordinarily judgemental about each other's beliefs. These are not just causal judgements, or abstract disagreements. In key social interactions you will be scrutinised for whether you might be a Communist or a Capitalist or a Socialist or a Nationalist or a Globalist or a Democrat or a Republican or a Feminist or an Environmentalist or a Christian or a Muslim or an Atheist, and so on and on. And on the basis of prejudices for or against these isms, you will be morally judged – with powerful prejudice if you are suspected to fail in some ideological conformity. It is a recipe for petty-minded neuroticism. Academics are the most intensely neurotic about such things – with bitter wars waged for years between academic philosophers and scientists, over variations of ideological belief that seem utterly meaningless to outsiders. It is pathetic to see grown-up adults squabbling like this. Demanding such conformity is part of forming the social solidarity of groups. It is not only that your judges hold personal feelings about such beliefs themselves – it is also that they cannot afford to let others in their ingroup think they will associate with those holding alternative beliefs. People are emotionalised into public displays of approving and disapproving beliefs for social acceptance. Thus it is within the professions of science. The claim of science to objectivity is really a myth. Objectivity is an ideal of science, but it is overridden by egocentric psychology – sustained more than ever by the scientistic ideology. What is most striking is how insidious this phenomenon is in modern society, and how quickly and easily people are sparked to strong emotions of 91 judgement, especially negative emotions, contempt, anger and hatred, about very abstract beliefs. In the academic world such judgements are virulent. There are surely psychological or cognitive reasons for this that should be central to understanding social behaviour. I think it is partly because we take emotions as perceptions of value, and conversely, we perceive values as emotions. (If we like something it is good. If we hate something it is bad. If something is good we like it. If something is bad we hate it. ) So we cannot separate our value judgements from our emotions about them, or at least not without great effort. In any case, these overpowering and irrational judgements are hardly mitigated by modern education. On the contrary, they are prominent within intellectualised professions – academics, scientists, executives, teachers, lawyers, bureaucrats those who have taken the social engineering messages of our education system most to heart. This mentality has now taken over in the domain that was meant to be separated from emotionalism, and science has become saturated with emotional ideology. What is also evident is that the orthodox academic philosophy of science has dismally failed to be of any help. It is more responsible for creating ideological conflicts than resolving them. I agree with López Corredoira that it has ceased to have any positive value within scientific practice. It has abdicated interest in the real problems of science in relation to society. It has failed to give any meaningful guidance on the problem of incorporating scientific knowledge into a wider philosophical understanding. Exiling philosophy outside science has left a terrible vacuum within science. It is nowhere more evident than in the modern attitudes to Materialism and naturalistic metaphysics, as noted next in the concluding section to this Part. Materialism and naturalistic metaphysics. Science is a system of factual knowledge, and primarily suited to developing empirical knowledge of the physical world. But its most important and fascinating implications are in metaphysics. Science informs key aspects of our larger world view: questions about where we came from, what we are, what our fate is. Particle physics, astronomy, cosmology, thermodynamics, chaos theory, evolutionary theory, biology, genetics, micro-biology, cognitive science, information theory, logic and linguistics, all have a deep impact on our understanding of the nature of ourselves and the world we live in. These sciences have transformed our views about fundamental laws of nature and causation, the nature of matter, the nature of time and space, the origin of the physical universe, the nature of living processes, the origins of life, the basis of intelligence, the nature of cognition, thought and language. These are areas of pure science that have the deepest interest for our larger metaphysical conception of the world 92 and our place in it. Philosophy and metaphysics cannot be done in a vacuum, without recognising knowledge we have gained from science. Making sense of scientific knowledge is a crucial part of philosophy. But it is very difficult to make sense of science. The intrinsic difficulty is because science is in process: it is fundamentally unfinished and unstable. Thus far in history, scientific metaphysics has proved to be the most unstable aspect of science. For this relates to its formulation of broad comprehensive theories, proposed as theoretical ontologies. We have made steady progress in giving scientific explanations of many phenomenon – and these can certainly become stable. But science has only partial theories, and is far from having a complete view of the nature of physical reality at a deep level. The instability of scientific theories is obvious when we look back over the last 350 years of Western science – from the time of Newton's theory of mechanics and gravity. It is obvious when we look back over the last 80 years, or the span of one person's life-time. Science has changed dramatically in this short period. Practically all the 'modern views' about the subjects listed above have formed within this short period – the expanding universe, Big Bang cosmology, Standard Model of particle physics, DNA and genetics, neo-Darwinian evolution theory, information theory, chaos theory, modern logic and linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience. We should remember that the proton was not identified until 1919! (Rutherford). The neutron was not identified until 1932! (Chadwick). (But then within 13 years we had started using nuclear bombs). The fact that the Milky Way is only one galaxy among numerous others was not established until 1920s. The concept of an expanding universe was not established until 1929. It seems amazing to me that the CMBR was not identified until the 1960's! Cosmology today is full of anomalies and paradoxes and speculative 'dark substances'. It should be stressed that there is no understanding of the ultimate origin or fate of the physical universe at all. It is completely unknown whether our universe is in a cyclic expansion-and-collapse process, or due to expand forever, or to collapse permanently in the future. Physicists will pontificate on their 'best guess' about this, and today usually tell you that it will keep expanding; but in fact they have no more realistic idea than you do. No scientist has a clue about where the universe came from. Even the dimensionality of space is completely unknown. Fundamental particle physics today is similarly incomplete, with multiple anomalies, conflicting theories, and a basic failure to tackle foundational issues. Progress in the life sciences has historically been even slower. The double-helix structure of DNA, and encoding of genes, were not discovered until the 1950s! The origin of life on Earth remains unknown, and the existence of extraterrestrial life is unknown. It is clear that species evolve, but detailed mechanisms, including interaction with intelligence, are unknown. 93 Neuroscience is also in its early infancy, with no good theory yet of the logical structure of the neuronal network. The example noted in Part 2 below of Richard Faull shows that neurologists were unaware until very recently (2007!) even of the basic fact that the human brain reproduces and replenishes neurons – with leading scientific authorities refusing to admit it when scientifically demonstrated. The basis of consciousness remains completely opaque to physical science – particularly the interaction of consciousness with the physical machinery supporting intelligence – two quite distinct concepts that are regularly conflated by scientists. Mainstream research into linguistics and natural language – theories of the 'deep structure' of natural language – has stalled since the 1970s, and represents a failed paradigm. This translates into a profound failure in AI (artificial intelligence) research paradigms, because attempts to generate recursive intelligence in computer programs must be able to solve the problem of natural language semantics. What we have so far in AI are just elaborate pattern-recognition machines based on ad hoc programming techniques in an application of brute force and ignorance. So what metaphysical conclusions can we draw from science? Despite its radical incompleteness, which realistic scientists will admit to, there is nonetheless one metaphysical view widely drawn from science: Materialism. This holds that everything real reduces to a material reality. There is surely a problem claiming this as a scientific conclusion given the incompleteness of so many fundamental sciences claiming to support it. But the first problem to my mind is that it is itself is a very vague idea, encoding a number of different conceptions under one umbrella. I think the claim that many scientists really want to express is a principle of 'causal unification': that everything real is causally connected in a single framework of natural laws and substances. The point is that science has continued to expand the boundaries of what counts as 'material things', or 'substances', to incorporate expanded evidence of causality. E.g. in the C19th, Faraday and Maxwell and others introduced the idea of electromagnetic fields. These appeared be ghostly non-material entities, diffused through space. They literally represent potentialenergy fields. As such they met resistance from Materialists of the time, who did not believe in things that were not 'material substances'. They might allow 'fields' as mathematical constructions perhaps, but not as referring to real physical things. Eventually these objections were overcome (and it was recognised as a metaphysical dogma to identify: material = corpuscular), notably when light was shown to be a free electromagnetic field. Individual particles of light can be transmitted across space, and it seems the 'free electromagnetic fields' representing them must be real material things. Today of course physics is full of 'fields' – EM fields, quantum fields – indeed the quantum vacuum is full of virtual particles, representing vacuum fields, so there is not even such a thing as 94 'empty space' any more. Indeed, some philosophers think that there are no particles, only fields (e.g. there is a paradox in quantum field theory, that your count of particles in a volume of space depends on your state of motion.) These fields seem suspiciously ethereal, non-material – but they have a role in unifying the causal connections, providing the mechanism for quantum particles to exchange energy and momentum. So materialists simply expand their definition and call them 'material'. Thus science will expand its conception of what is 'material' according to whatever is required to model causality. How could we hope to prescribe what kinds of 'materiality' physical things have, before empirically investigating them? Nowadays, cosmology proposes 'dark matter', 'dark energy', 'quintessence', mysteriously undetectable 'substances'. Quantum mechanics is defined by quantum waves which have disturbingly non-materialistic properties – they are spread over space, they can 'jump' instantaneously from one place to another, they can be entangled with each other over large distances. And relativity theory postulates curved space-time, defined by what is called a metric field. Is space-time a 'material substance'? Most relativists would say that it is physically real: it is quite distinct in kind from the material particles embedded in it, but it affects their motions, and is affected by them. So what does 'materialism' mean any more, when such a host of ephemeral 'substances' are inferred to be real? The classical concept of material substances has long broken down. The classical vision of materialism was a simplistic one of 'atoms-in-a-box', a simple common-sense dualism of matter (atoms) in space (container). This is based on a simplistic concept that the part-whole composition of physical objects is simple spatial decomposition – defined by breaking things down into smaller and smaller bits, that are mutually impenetrable, and cannot overlap. Causality is seen in this vision as being strictly local – things only affect each other when they 'touch'. It is a simplistic conception derived from ordinary perception of macroscopic objects. Nowadays, physical objects are seen as intrinsically interpenetrating, overlapping fields. And causality is distinctly non-local: in principle, every physical system in the universe can instantaneously affect any other system. In this sense, the simplistic materialist vision that most Materialists still visualise has actually been long overthrown in physics. Modern Materialists cannot define their belief in terms of prescribing the material of the universe, because no one knows what it is any more! It is easier to ask what kinds of things Materialists reject. The first thing they reject are 'transcendental causes' or 'supernatural agencies', such as 'life forces', anima, interactions with spirits, souls, God or gods, etc. They reject these as having any place in a unified causal account of physics. In traditional thought, such agencies lie outside 'laws of nature', and are said to cause things by a mysterious exertion of will or intelligence. It is this kind of ad hoc explanation that scientists primarily reject as being scientific. 95 But it is a big jump from rejecting ad hoc causal agencies in physics, to the vast metaphysical implications claimed by Materialism. For rejecting appeal to 'supernatural agencies' in causal laws of physics does not rule out that souls, spirits or God may yet still exist; that some entities that appear supernatural to us might end up having real causal physical connections to us after all. Esp, as mentioned earlier, is an example: the demand that physics is causally unified by general laws does not rule out the possibility of esp, or a nonmaterial source of personal identity, or many similar things rejected by Materialists. What Materialism certainly does not do is to scientifically explain the phenomenon of subjectivity: consciousness, mind, personal identity. This is what ideological Materialists claim: that science has explained how these reduce to 'brain activity'. This claim is just not true. What Materialism claims is that there must be a purely physical explanation of subjective phenomenon, given in the same terms as other physics, referring only to fundamental particles and forces. It does not follow that science has given such an explanation. It most certainly has not. And while the nature of subjectivity lacks any real scientific explanation or model, so does value, morality, purpose, and so on, i.e. the concepts of moral philosophy that Materialists so much want to destroy in their eagerness for a nihilistic doctrine. Another claim implicit in Materialism is monism, the idea that there is ultimately only one kind of substance, which is physical. Today this is often described as energy (or mass-energy), rather than just 'matter'. We will be told that everything that exists is really a form of physical energy. Again, this contradicts the classical Materialist dualism that the universe consists of matter in space and time. For space (or now space-time) is not itself reduced to 'energy' in conventional physics, it is a container for energy. I would also object to the idea that monism implies any of the traditional implications drawn from Materialism. In this respect, I support a heterodox theory of physics, which is a strong form of monism, where everything is actually composed of 'space' – shapes and wave-motions of an underlying 'aether', which appears to us as both space and matter. It is similar in a way to the C19th theory of 'vortex atoms', which goes back to Descartes' vortex theory of matter. Similar suggestions that a form of monism will be the ultimate end of physics have been suggested regularly, e.g. by Wheeler in the 1970's . The aether-based theory I have proposed is a genuine type of monism, it is causally unified, and it has simple precise mathematical laws. So if this was established, one might think it would justify Materialism. And yet this theory contradicts all the usual prescriptions of Materialism! It is a causally unified theory but it entails far more physical connectivity than recognised in conventional physics, identifying real structures lying outside ordinary three-dimensional space – for it requires a multi-dimensional theory of space to model particle physics and gravity. See (Holster WEBREF (c), (e). ) 96 I think this is an essential kind of theory to consider – not just as physics, but because it shows that radical metaphysical possibilities remain entirely consistent with our present knowledge of fundamental physics. For it allows realistic correlates for entities such as 'souls' or 'spirits' and even 'God'. The ideological Scientistic Materialists dislike this because they have obnoxious views about metaphysics. They believe they have conclusively solved all the problems of philosophy and metaphysics through their materialistic 'scientific' doctrine, and they want to close down any debate, declaring 'metaphysics' to be nonsense. But there are many areas of real metaphysics, traditional and modern, that are central to understanding. Metaphysics may be thought irrelevant within narrowly defined scientific specialities: but it is central to natural philosophy, to the larger goal of drawing out a philosophical understanding from science. I have illustrated the major form that modern metaphysics takes, in the form of possible world theory, in Appendix 6. This is a point where modern logic, analysis, and naturalistic science all meet. It is not some kind of abstract speculation about meaningless pseudo-scientific generalities: it is a way of making the analysis of central concepts of physics, as well as theories of mind and existence and logical semantics, precise and explicit. In summary, there are different shades of 'materialism', and different shades of 'metaphysics'. Many ordinary people and many scientists have a general conviction that reality is all based in material reality, i.e. in the physical world. Thus they say consciousness is based in the brain, and not in some transcendental realm of spirits or souls. And methodologically: when we come to investigate consciousness, we should start with what we know and can measure, the brain. We do not start with assumptions about something transcendental. I think this is a reasonable belief, even though I do not believe the reality is ultimately so simple myself. But as far as I am concerned, people are perfectly entitled to adopt such beliefs – and brain science is a primary starting point to investigate consciousness (only not the only one). This is 'materialism' with a small m. I would say López Corredoira is a materialist in this sense. But the philosophy is dominated by much more radical ideological Materialists, with a big M. These are ideological extremists (typified by the New Atheists or NeoAtheists), who believe fervently in a bundle of scientistic Positivist-Materialist doctrines, and want to force their world-view on everyone. They want to rule the domain of Science itself under the iron hand of their own orthodoxy. They claim Science as proof of Materialism. They openly despise metaphysics, philosophy, morals, religion. Like political ideologues, they are usually impassioned, arrogant, intolerant and loud. Turning science into a domain of personal ideology, they destroy the fundamental principles of scientific objectivity. 97 These people are a powerful destructive force within orthodox science, and within orthodox philosophy of science. They are the real enemies of creative heterodox scientists, and the true enemies of philosophy. Over decades, they have taken increasingly control of scientific culture, dominating propaganda, media, gate-keeping roles and power structures. They have destroyed the philosophy of science. They represent one kind of the death of science. The death of the spirit that comes from driving true scientists from Einstein's Temple. 98 REFERENCES. Alvarez, LW, Alvarez, W, Asaro, F, and Michel, HV (1980). "Extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction". Science 208 (4448): 1095–1108. Bannister, Robert. 1991. Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940. The University of North Carolina Press. de Beauregard, Olivia Costa. 1980. Time: The Physical Magnitude. Riedel. de Beauregard, Olivia Costa. 1980. "CPT Invariance and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics". Found.Phys. 10 (1980) 7/8, pp. 513-531. Benton, Michael J. 1997. "Dusk of the dinosaurs." Scientific American. Sep 97. Vol. 277 Issue 3. Björk, Bo-Christer; Roos, Annikki and Lauri, Mari (2009). "Scientific journal publishing: yearly volume and open access availability." Information Research, Vol. 14, no. 1, March, 2009. http://www.informationr.net/ir/14-1/paper391.html Bronowski, J. 1978. The Common Sense of Science. Harvard University Press. Bryson, Bill. 2003. A Short History of Nearly Everything. Black Swan. Callender, C. 2000. "Is Time Handed in a Quantum World?". Proc.Arist.Soc, 121 (2000) pp 247-269. Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Corredoira, Martín López. 2013. The Twilight of the Scientific Age. Brown Walker Press. Devine, S. 2003. "A systems look at the science reforms". New Zealand Science Review. Vol 60 (70-74). Duzí, Marie; Jespersen, Bjorn and Materna, Pavel. 2010. Procedural Semantics for Hyperintensional Logic. Foundations and Applications of Transparent Intensional Logic. Springer. Edmeades, Doug. 2004. "Is the commercial model appropriate for science?" New Zealand Science Review. Vol 61 (3-4). Edmeades, Doug. 2015. "McScience diet hard is to swollow". NZ Farmer, June 15, 2015 Einstein, Albert. 1918. "Temple of Science". Address at the Physical Society, Berlin, for Max Planck's 60th birthday. Einstein, Albert. 1954. Ideas and Opinions. Crown Publishers (1982). Einstein, Albert. 1920. "Aether and the Theory of Relativity". Address delivered on May 5th, 1920, at the University of Leyden, Germany. Copy sourced from: http://www.aetherometry.com/Electronic_Publications/Science/Einste in's_aether_and_relativity 99 Faull, Richard L. M., et alia. 2007. "Human Neuroblasts Migrate to the Olfactory Bulb via a Lateral Ventricular Extension." Science 2 March 2007: 1243-1249. Fellman, Bruce. 1988. "Shootout at the K/T boundary". The Scientist. Oct 3. 1988. http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/9830/title/ Shootout-At-The-K-T-Boundary/ Feyeraband, Paul. 1975. Against Method. Verso. Gleick, James. 1987. Chaos. Cardinal. Hager, Nicky. 2002. Seeds of Distrust. The story of a GE cover-up. Craig Potton Publishing. Hankins, Thomas L. 1985. Science and the Enlightenment. Cambridge. Haramein, Nassim. 2012. " Quantum Gravity and the Holographic Mass." Physical Review & Research International. ISSN: 2231-1815. Vol 3, Issue 4 (Oct-Dec). Healey, R. 1981. "Statistical Theories, Quantum Mechanics and the Directedness of Time". (1981), pp.99-127. In Reduction, Time and Reality, ed. R. Healey. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981). Holster, A. 2003 (a). "The criterion for time symmetry of probabilistic theories and the reversibility of quantum mechanics". New Journal of Physics. 5. http://stacks.iop.org/1367-2630/5/130. Holster, A. 2003 (b). "Proper Time, Coordinate Systems, Lorentz Transformations." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/proper-t/ Lee, T.D. 1988. Symmetries, Asymmetries, and the World of Particles. Washington University Press. López Corredoira ,Martín. 2013. The Twilight of the Scientific Age. Brown Walker Press. McCall, Storrs. 1994. A Model of the Universe. Oxford. McCall, Storrs. 1976. "Objective time flow." Phil.Sci. 43. 337-362. Meyer, Stephen. 2009. Signature in the Cell. DNA and the evidence for intelligent design. Harper Collins. Misner, C.W., Thorne, K.S. and Wheeler, J.A., 1973. Gravitation. Freeman. Mlodinow, Leonard and Chopra, Deepak. 2011. War of the World Views. Morrison, Heather, Salhab, J. Calvé-Genest A. and Horava, T. 2014. "Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey." Publications 2015, 3, 1-16. www.mdpi.com/journal/publications Oddie, Graham. 1986. Likeness to Truth. D.Reidel. Pollack, Gerald. 2013. The Fourth Phase of Water. Ebner and Sons. Seattle. Robertson, D.S., Lewis, W.M., Sheehan, P.M. & Toon, O.B. 2013. "K/Pg extinction: re-evaluation of the heat/fire hypothesis". Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. 100 Roy, R., Rao, M. L. and J. Kanzius. 2008. "Observations of polarised RF radiation catalysis of dissociation of H2O–NaCl solutions". Materials Research Innovations 2008 VOL 12 NO 1. Sheldrake, Rupert. 2012. The Science Delusion. Hodder & Stoughton. Spivak, Michael. 1979. A Comprehensible Introduction to Differential Geometry. Publish or Perish. Thrussell, David. 2015. "Magician of the Gods. An interview with Graham Hancock." New Dawn, No 153. Nov-Dec 2015. pp.17-22. Tichy, Pavel. 2004. Pavel Tichy's Collected Papers in Logic and Philosophy. 2004. Ed. V Svoboda, B. Jesperson, C. Cheyne. Otago-Praha, Otago UP, Filosofia. Tichy, Pavel. 1988. The Foundations of Frege's Logic. De Gruyter. Tichy, Pavel. 1984. "Subjunctive Conditionals: Two Parameters vs. Three". Philosophical Studies, 45, 147-179. Reprinted in (Tichy, 2004). Tichy, Pavel. 1974. "On Popper's definitions of verisimilitude." Brit.J.PhilSci., 25, 155-188. Reprinted in (Tichy, 2004). p.155-160. Watanabe, Satosi. 1955. "Symmetry of Physical Laws. Part 3. Prediction and Retrodiction." Rev.Mod.Phys. 27 (1) (1955) pp 179-186. Watanabe, Satosi. 1965. "Conditional Probability in Physics". Suppl.Prog.Theor.Phys. (Kyoto) Extra Number (1965) pp 135-167. Woit, Peter. 2006. Not Even Wrong. Jonathon Cape. Ziman, John. 1984. Introduction to Science Studies. The Philosophical and Social Aspects of Science and Technology. Cambridge University Press. Ziman, John. 1994. Prometheus Bound: Science in a dynamic steady state. Cambridge University Press. Wolbach, W. S., I. Gilmour, E. Anders, C. J. Orth, and R. R. Brooks. 1988. Global fire at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, Nature, 334, 665–669. 101 WEB REFERENCES. Atkinson, Nancy. 2015. It Looks Like an Asteroid Strike Can't Cause a Worldwide, Dinosaur-Killing Firestorm. http://www.universetoday.com/118633/it-looks-like-an-asteroid-strike-cant-causea-worldwide-dinosaur-killing-firestorm/ Beall. 2015. Beall's List of Predatory Publishers 2015. http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/01/02/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2015/ Faull, Richard. 2013. "Rethinking the brain". TED Talks. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT_Z6kULoVw Institute for Venture Science. http://www.theinstituteforventurescience.net/ Manifesto for a Post Materialist Science. http://opensciences.org/about/manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science Open Science Movement. http://opensciences.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science TIL Homepage http://til.phil.muni.cz/index.php Willis, Dick. 2015. "AgResearch has lost its way." Sep 25, 2015. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=1151896 5 102 WEB REFERENCES HOLSTER. These are free preprints and papers on the Internet by the author. Holster, A. (a) 2015 "Effects of Radio Frequency Water Treatment on Revival of Wilted Flowers." (Ref to be added). (b) 2015 "Water: The Mystery". http://philpapers.org/archive/HOLWTM (c) 2014/15 "A Geometric Model of the Universe with Time Flow". http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLAGM (d) 2014 "How to Analyse Retrodictive Probabilities in Inference to the Best Explanation." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLHTA (e) 2014. "The Aethereal Universe". http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLTAU (f) 2014. "Extrinsic and Intrinsic Curvature". http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLD5 (g) 2014 (2003). "Geometric model of gravity, counterfactual solar mass, and the Pioneer anomalies." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLGMO (h) 2014. "Principles of physical time directionality and fallacies of the conventional philosophy." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLPOP-2 (i) 2014. The Time Flow Manifesto. (Preprint book chapters). "The Time Flow Manifesto: Introduction." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLTTF "Chapter 1: Concepts of Time Direction." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLTTF-5 "Chapter 2: Time Symmetry in Physics." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLTTF-6 "Chapter 3: Reversibility in Physics." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLTTF-7 "Chapter 4: Metaphysical Time Flow." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLTTF-2 "Chapter 5: Time Flow Physics." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLTTF-3 "Chapter 6: Philosophical Issues." http://philpapers.org/rec/HOLTTF-4 (j) 2004. "Time Flow Physics: Introduction to a unified theory based on time flow." http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1641/ (k) 2003. "An Introduction to Pavel Tichy and Transparent Intensional Logic." http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1479/ (l) 2003. "The time reversal invariance of classical electromagnetic theory: Albert versus Malament." http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1475/ (m) 2003. "The Quantum Mechanical Time Reversal Operator." http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1449/ 103 (n) 2003. "The incompleteness of extensional object languages of physics and time reversal. Part 1". http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1451/ (o) 2003. " ... Part 2". http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1452/ (p) 1990. Time Flow and Irreversibility in a Probabilistic Universe. (PhD Thesis) http://muir.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/3159/02_whole.pdf?sequence =1 (q) 2007. US Patent 7979449 B2. "System and method for representing, organizing, storing and retrieving information." (2007/2008/2011). https://www.google.com/patents/US