Re: [Fis] consilience of limited observers

Dear Pedro, Stan, and All,

I have some questions in reference to Pedro's and Stan's nice line of
discussion.

Pedro wrote:

> 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').

So, you don't think that the use of common tools, such as logic, statistics,
etc., or even common concepts (such as Aleks's example of intereactive
information) are enough to forge a genuine inter-disciplinary consilience?
In what way would a *genuine* informational approach be different?

Pedro wrote:

> A related 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.

There is a distinction made in philosophy of science between the internal
dynamics of science, which excludes socio-psychological factors, and
external dynamics, which looks only at the social dynamics of scientific
communities. This seems to be similar to the distinction that Pedro is
making. If so, his claim is that interdisciplinary consilience cannot be
captured within the internalist's way of viewing science (that is, in terms
of the bare relationship between theories and their evidence). I have some
questions about this.

I think that anyone who studies science has to make some kind of
idealization or abstraction--science is too complex to understand in total.
Some simplifications have to be made when studying any complex phenomenon.
Clearly that does not imply that the particular idealizations made by the
internalists or the externalists are the right ones, or the best ones, to
make for the purpose of understanding some particular aspect of science,
such as interdisciplinary consilience. So, I am very open to Pedro's line
of thought. On the other hand, there has to some kind of simplification
made. How should this be done?

Pedro wrote:

> 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?

This is a partial answer to my question: A general understanding of how
macroscopic order arises out of simple interactive micro-systems may point
the way towards a better understanding of science.

An example that I know more about arises in physics, where it is difficult
to explain why matter organizes itself into liquid, gas and solid phases
when interacting molecules "know" nothing about the macroscopic order of
which they are a part. This phenomenon is hard to explain because critical
phenomena (occurring during phase transitions) depend on correlations that
act at all distances at the same time. That is, the usual idealization that
density fluctuations are limited to micro-scales does not work. Rather, the
fluctuations occur at all length scales (hence the self-similarity of
critical phenomena). The mathematical techniques applied to this problem
(scaling, intermediate asymptotics, and renormalization methods borrowed
from quantum field theory) are still not very well understood from a
mathematical point of view.

However, I still don't see exactly how this connects with interdisciplinary
consilience in Pedro's sense. This may be because I'm not sure exactly what
interdisciplinary consilience amounts to on this view.

> At least, we should seriously consider the 'limitations' of the individual
> / observer when approaching the interdisciplinary consilience problem.

But why should it be considered seriously, exactly? I don't (yet) see why
the internalist view of science has this limitation. For it abstracts away
of the distinction between individual scientists and a group of scientists,
so it could easily include emergent features that arise from the
interactions between individuals. If not, why not?

Malcolm

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Received on Mon Oct 18 18:11:28 2004