[Fis] consilience of limited observers

Dear colleagues,

Overall, I get along with Malcolm's mixture of the linear and the circular
views, as it seems untenable asking for a strict symmetry between "levels".
As he points out, the discussion of reductionism easily becomes ideological
(I assume my guilt) when handling the term outside the precise connotation
of relationship between theories.

Rather than continuing the discussion about Stan's integrative categories,
I would advocate for the search of a genuine 'informational' approach to
the sciences. I mean, logics, natural language, number theory, etc., are
important tools of most scientific disciplines, but they tell very little
on how the disciplines should interrelate. Or about the 'relevance' of the
different approaches to the problems to confront. Per se, they are not
tools of inter-disciplinary consilience (they are 'intra').

A realted problem is that most of the abstractions needed for the sciences
militate against an adequate 'external' vision of the sciences themselves.
When we abstract, idealize, rationalize, categorize, measure, etc., quite
often we go beyond any imperfections and limitations ("God's view" --for
Gell-Mann it is the "principle of rational description of the universe").
If this point of view is applied to the sciences, we leave in the outside
the very social and temporal structure of the scientific communities: means
of communication, consensus formation, fixation of standards, criss-cross
of references, emergence of 'fields', paradigms, etc., dialog between
different scientific communities, interdisciplinary consilience itself.

Let me speculate that future 'informational' explorations of similar
problems that have barely been addressed yet (how living cells emerge out
from very limited 'molecular societies of enzymes', how nervous systems and
consciousness emerge out from terribly limited 'societies of individual
neurons'...) may throw a new light on the globality of the scientific
enterprise. At least, we should seriously consider the 'limitations' of the
individual / observer when approaching the interdisciplinary consilience
problem. After all, wasn't a good part of new physics stemming out from
theorizing upon limitations of the scientific observer in his/her idealized
actions/perceptions in different settings--uncertainty, second law, relativity?

best

Pedro

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Received on Fri Oct 15 11:54:17 2004