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This post is some thoughts from having read The Forbidden Sea. While I avoid giving specific story details, just mentioning the themes does potentially give spoilers. So please consider reading the book before you read this post. In a review of Sheila Nielson’s (my sister) book, The Forbidden Sea, over at M* I mentioned that [...]
Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground in past posts. The problem with this ‘Reason as a Guide to Reality’ series of posts is that they build on concepts from past posts. It’s easy to get lost in all the concepts. So let’s do a quick review of past ideas and build up the principles [...]
In my last post, I declared victory for Scientific Realism over Positivism on the grounds that even if Positivism is right, it’s first “prediction” must always be that we ignore it as “truth” – at least to some degree – and be committed to our theories a “the truth” or else we can’t make scientific [...]
In my last post I quoted Stephen Hawking’s defense of Positivism. He even goes so far as to suggest that there is no all encompassing view of reality but instead only “a family of interconnected theories, each describing its own version of reality…” (p. 70) But accepting Positivism as the true nature of reality has [...]
In my last post I finished comparing Popper and Kuhn and again concluded that there really isn’t much difference between the two other than on the issue of Scientific Realism vs. Positivism. That is to say, Popper believes that science actually discovers theories close and closer to the truth whereas Kuhn believes it becomes more [...]
In my last post I reviewed Kuhn’s ideas on how the growth of scientific knowledge takes place. I found that, contrary to popular belief, Kuhn and Popper have more in common than they have different. Both deny all the popular notions of science as being based primarily around use of observation to refute the current [...]
In my last post on Wheat and Tares, I wrote somewhat glowingly of Popper’s epistemology based on Conjecture and Refutation. In a post on Millennial Star I even went so far as to explain why I felt there were some touch points between conjecture and refutation and the Gospel. To summarize, Popper believes all knowledge [...]
As discussed in my last post, if science can’t be justified by inductive reasoning, how do we justify it? Popper’s own epistemology (i.e. theory of how we gain knowledge) is based around conjecture and refutation. All knowledge is gained by starting with conjecture. Interestingly, inductive reason does seem to play a role in this. As [...]
In my last post I argued that, contrary to popular belief, science is not actually about observation. Here I wish to taken an aside and discuss two of the main competing schools of epistemology (i.e. the theory of how we gain knowledge). The traditional view of science was founded by Francis Bacon. This school of [...]
In previous posts I responded (or gave other people’s responses anyhow) to the ideas that science is primarily about prediction, Reductionism, or Holism. In those ideas we found some truth, but not the whole truth. Another common point of view is that science is really about observation. Related to this is the idea that science [...]
…the chameleonic nature of numbers [is] so rich and complex that numerical patterns have the flexibility to mirror any other kind of pattern. (Douglas Hoftsadter in I am a Strange Loop, p. 159) In my last post, I discussed the point of view known as ‘reductionism’ and the problems with that point of view. In [...]
In my last post I discussed Scientific Realism vs. Positivism. The conclusion I drew was that, while both are useful points of view, Scientific Realism is the one you want if your desire is to comprehend reality. In this post, I’m going to discuss Deutsch’s arguments surrounding Reductionism and Holism, two points of view that [...]
In my last post I started to discuss the differences between Positivism and Scientific Realism. To over simplify it, Positivism cares only about the predictive abilities of science and does not care about whether or not science is getting ever closer to some underlying truth. Scientific Realism takes all scientific theories seriously as approximations of [...]
Science is the process of how we use reason to find patterns in reality and then to explain them in finite explanations of reality that allow us to represent reality via processes that are computable. In my last post, I introduced David Deutsch’s book, The Fabric of Reality. Deutsch’s main interest is in understanding – [...]
In my last post I considered Physicist John Barrow’s view of what science is: So we find that Barrow’s view of science is that it is the process of how we use reason to find patterns in reality and then to algorithmically compress them into finite steps and formula that allow us to represent reality [...]
In a previous post I showed how to calculate PI and made the point that purely mental concepts, like PI, actually do exist. Also, don’t miss this post on M* where I considered how to use math to measure the earth and the moon – a power once associated with Divinity. Now I want you [...]
Did you ever hear the one about the dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac? He stayed up all night wondering if there really was a dog. Like many people, I’m curious about the nature of reality and really do sometimes stay up all night wondering about… well, just about anything. A while back I wrote this post about [...]
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