Monday, February 22, 2010

Is Science a "meme"?

I'm interested in the first tangent on the Forum Thread question about “Natural Phenomenon” of whether Science is a meme.

The idea that the "methods of science" are empirically successful, or that "Science" is empirically successful, is premature. The usefulness of Science and its methods is also questionable, on a long enough time frame, and depending on what you consider success. The methods of Science and the technological use of its product, Scientific theories, have arguably allowed exponential population growth and exponential increase of resource use over the last couple of Centuries, so over that time frame one can say fairly clearly that Science is a successful meme. The real question, however, is whether the human race will wipe itself out in the next hundred years or in the next thousand years or not. If we do, Science, insofar as we take it to be characteristic of us relative to other animals, is a pretty poor meme. Perhaps 20 generations. Hopeless.

Science has been subjected to a number of challenges to its value, but one of the most damning was Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring". Scientists were shown not to have understood more than a small part of the consequences of the technological and industrial use of Science. The ripples of disbelief that Science is necessarily a good thing are reflected every time a Scientist decries Global Warming and is ignored. One can say that it is technology's and industry's use of Science that is at fault, and more broadly that it is the individuals in society that are at fault for wanting washing machines, TVs, cheaply manufactured food, ..., but splitting the whole system up in that way is beside the point. Indeed, the reductionist move of saying that Science is a useful meme, war is a bad meme, ..., misses that it is the whole system that is under the knife at every moment. We cannot do much more than guess how the system will evolve, but we make wild statements about what is good or bad.

6 comments :

Mike Gottschalk said...

Peter,

I see the thread you're referring to, holding science in comparison to other memes as more successful due to its predictability success in nature.

I see you questioning this assessment on the basis that predictability only occurs on scales that are much less than the whole; there's a kind of illusion involved here.

Am I understanding this part of your point so far?

Peter said...

Yup. Less than the whole is only a fraction.

Illusion is a difficult word. One could take a wholly solipsist view of the world, or think in some other highly skeptical way about our experience of life for a minute at a time, perhaps, or even until the dog needs to be fed, but I generally don't think of measurement results as illusions. I suspect you're going to take me on a wild ride here, Mike, but I want to resist some directions you might go, just a little.

What I would say is that any vision we might have of how it's good or useful to think about the world (although I always want to say that a theory smells right, because the dog might understand that) is open to revision when we look the other way, or from a different place.

Peter said...

The dog cares little about being fed, that was an hour ago. Now it's a walk that's needed. Now. Smells are better when you have to find them out than when you're presented with them.

Mike Gottschalk said...

Yes- illusion is a difficult word and I'm not intending to hinge something on that idea.

Adam Frank coined a phrase that I like: Reality's there- you push on it and it pushes back. I don't know what it is but I love this thought- as much as any "spiritual" idea, really.

Actually, my next question after ascertaining whether or not I was understanding your foundation, was- Where do you want us to go with your insight?

Peter said...

I think the difference between short-term and long-term success underlies everything a Scientist does, and we should be comfortable with it. Getting a paper published is a small Scientific success, but getting a paper published that has a mostly good effect on the world in a thousand years time is awesome, but we will never know what will happen to an idea over such long periods --- how many people will die, how many will live, partly because of Karl Marx or of a vision of someone thinking now. Of course the same is true for any idea or any action by anyone or by any group. The sword of Damocles is there all the time, for all of us.

Another take is that what we do now may turn out to be good or bad on long time-scales, and I think we have a responsibility at least to try to second-guess consequences ten or a hundred or a thousand years out. I'd like to say that we should be more careful about introducing novel applications of Science, but that would be to pretend that Scientists have much control of the applications. Also, testing something in the small (a million washing machines and the detergent they use, say) sometimes gives no idea of what problems will arise when it is ever-present.

I think we're in a Silent Spring moment, consequences of technology, resource use, and population growth coming home to roost, but the story apparently hasn't yet been told in a telling enough way to get engineering, industrial, and political action. But the problem is perhaps just that there's so little consensus about what should be done rather than whether there's a problem.

It has nothing to do with Science, but it doesn't help that the rules of the Senate were changed a couple of decades ago to make it much easier to filibuster, so that unless there is bipartisan agreement about something a super-majority is required to take any action.

Reading through this, it all falls apart, because really how much can we predict the weather tomorrow, still less the consequences of ideas that begin so subtly that nobody can know where and when or how they will cause a hurricane.

Mike Gottschalk said...

I disagree- your thought here doesn't just fall apart. I think your saying something quite important.

To argue that the predicting power attributed to science is not omniscient, is bold on your part.

So how do we bring the power that science is, to a world that the predicting aspects of science will never be able to encapsulate without first arbitrarily reducing it to fit within a logical system?

There are scales where prediction is right and needed. Is there something for science to offer beyond its natural scales and beyond prediction itself? It seems to me that somehow, this answer is yes.