The Limits and Limitations of Science

so I guess stating facts is bad form, but belittling someone of twice your IQ (Blaise, not me ) is fair game cuz he isn't around to stick up for himself? Odd rules you have here on a2k...

im just baiting you johny, however your too busy patting yourself on the back to do anything but try to belittle the other posters whove given of their own valuable time .

Im just wondering when youre going to get to Pascals preadamite world and the Spiritual context of your stuff.

Ill Wait, I bet its coming soon.

The Heisenberg principle says that the very act of observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon (he was referring to subatomic particle behavior). If this is true, there are some things modern science cannot determine.

Farmerman. Dewd. The subject is science. I used Pascal as bait. If'n ya wanna start a Pascal thread, I'll come!

Until you came along, the only one who got any belittling was a guy who figgered he could sneak a little disinformation past us on a hypocrisy-laced bluff. You friends of his?

Btw, you appear to have done a bit of homework about me; if you had done half as much about Pascal before posting, I would not have felt inclined to correct your errors.

jnhofzinser

Aparently we ( if you read Sauls book) have somewhat differing interpretations.

The whole book is a critique of "reason" as a cause of our current difficulties, much in the same way as an Athiest blames the Idea of a God for most of our troubles.

For instance his opening statement, and I quote---

"Reason is a narrow system swollen into an idealogy

With time and power it has become a dogma, devoid of direction and disguised as disinterested inquiry.

Like most religions, reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created."

He (Saul) spends the next 640 pages attempting to justify that statement, and he does have a few points.

He is a hard read but I am but a few pages from finishing. I never even got nearly so far with Mr. Pascal.

Pascal and Saul attempt to refute reason. Voltaire and Adam Smith celebrate it.

Perhaps I should not assume any prior knowledge on your part. Sorry

Anyone can read that page on Amazon, Mech, and get the number of pages, too. Nice try. Perhaps you missed Saul's less-poetic thesis statement:
The book is about politics, Mech. If you want a critique of reason, try Kant. If you want to discuss Saul, start another thread. With respect to reason, Pascal was never attempting a refutation; he just asked for honesty:
But let's both wait until Farmerman starts the Pascal thread if you'd like to take this tangent further, shall we?

johny, you want a thread, start one yourself. I noted that youve edited your snotty attitude out of previous threads.

Im waiting for the Orthodoxy to start .

as far as doing:homework "on you, ", is there a reason i should? pleeeease, you honor yourself too liberally

This is a bit too messy for me, but let me suggest that if Science should ever answer ALL our questions that might suggest that it will have disabled us as developers of new questions. The more we learn, the better should be the quality of our questions. Science and philosophy's function of generating questions is no less important than that of answering them.
Also let me ask. Is there a problem for the "objective" study of consciousness that that study is itself an activity of consciousness?

Never. When I edit, it is to correct typos or to improve clarity (as with the only edit on this thread ). Of course, you probably knew that. Whatever your agenda is, the truth appears to be immaterial for you. Maybe that's why I find you so irritating. As my signature indicates, I agree with this whole-heartedly. The unanswered questions are the interesting ones. And the meta-question, "which are unanswerable" is, perhaps, the most interesting question of all. Indeed, the analogy with the determination of "non-stopping computations" that apparently separate human and computer thought is not accidental.

Johann-i humbly apologize if i misread your posts too quickly . I thought I detected an edit or two to remove some "tones" If you hadnt done that,please accept my apology.i may have blended others posts with yours as im scrolling and i dont see an avatar to connect with the topic.

Having said that, im still not a great fan of out- of- context aphorisms from another age, especially when weve gone way beyond the observations that prompted them. they are often pithy and compelling "sounding'.but serve a purpose more of 'grounding" our methods rather than guiding them. The rules of science are that we build by standing on the shoulders of those whove gone before, and sometimes we dismiss what they say .
Im a part time collector of many of these "bumper stickers" and I use them in classes on methods of research. It is often great fodder for close inspection for someone to critique a super intellect by starting with
"Boy, if they only knew od the structure of DNA , or what would Leonardo say if he knew of plate tectonics "?

pS , dont worry about me, im harmless but i always enjoy a good dust up when i suspect that someone comes in from a Christian orthodox position. (Your quotes of Pascal are favorite set-up lines for many of our own school board hearings on the 'Place of science"). Ive been in depositions all week and whenever i log on Im still full of adrenaline , so , please pardon my unbridled enthusiasm.

Admittedly, my delight in Pascal colors this thread too heavily. Thanks for your gracious post. I assure you that I did NOT intend to turn the thread into a discussion of religion (my reference to "prayer" was clearly a mistake).

Incidentally, your knowledge of my first name (even though I go by my second) was a surprise (i.e., almost like you had done some "homework" -- or perhaps you know of my famous namesake?)

regards, nepo (off on vacation until the 5th -- have fun!)

Im getting ready to go back into a deposition, but when I saw your avatar and the hofzinser. The only name that came to mind was a magician in the 1800s.
enjoy,

How life began is probably answerable because it merely requires identifying the earliest biochemical processes (elements spontaneously form amino acids, which link to form proteins, RNA, etc. We don't know all of the exact mechanisms yet, but research is continually pushing back the boundaries) and working backward from known DNA sequences in simple organisms. We have access to the physical stuff we need to investigate and no fundamental change in our understanding of the universe is required.

I suspect that people put things they personally cannot comprehend in the unanswerable category. Someone on the cutting edge of cosmology may consider the origins of the universe to be knowable.

Farmer,

Terry, I suspect there is no limit to the achievement of answers to the "scientific" or testable questions we, as a species, CAN ask. My "unanswerable category" is a philosophical repository of "knowledge" that is inherently beyond our reach for reasons of our neurological limitations, just as an ant, no matter how adequate he is as an ant, cannot begin to engage in human-like inquiries. You say that "Someone on the cutting edge of cosmology may consider the origins of the universe to be knowable." Probably so regarding the origins, say, as close to the present as the Big Bang. But do you think they can even formulate questions about what preceded the Big Bang, or before that? I wonder if our conception of "knowledge" might even change sometime in the unforseeable future.

jnhofzinser,

If you read Saul as a critic of those who abuse reason I could go along with that much as I can go along with Martin Luthor when he criticized the Church of Rome for abusing the name of God.

I did not get that impression although it occurred to me today (due to your testimony) that that may have been what he is trying to do. I will reread some in that light and let you know in the "Books" forum.

I don't mind being ignorant, it's curable. There is no shame in age, simply inconvienience, but unfounded accusations of prevarication are simply rude.

I have read very little of Pascal, and probably still less of Marx. But you don't have to eat all the soup to know how it tastes, and I have found no reason to try a second helping of either, no matter how brilliantly the bowl shines

Fundamental limit: we can observe the past only indirectly (except in astronomy). In terms of the origins of life, this is a major limitation.

Great observation, Patiodog, light from the past. What about the geological markings on the sides of a mountain? But do we really see the past INDIRECTLY? You mean that the archives and other residua of the past are our indirect viewings of the past? That might be. But when I read the church records of a priest in colonial Mexico and see how he assigns ethnicity (Indian, Spanish, mestizo, Zambo, etc. etc.) to the people of his pueblo, do I see any more than HIS biases or readings of the ethnic distribution? Today, when you ask people to assign members of their ethnically complex and stratified community to these categories, the situation is very dynamic and problematical. I tend to think the RAW data of historians are far more COOKED than we think. We construct the past as much as we re-construct it.
Hope I havn't digressed too much.

Humans are unreliable, for sure. But I was thinking more in terms of the origins question, and we will never be able to look at the proto-cell, no matter how much we care to infer about it. So our place in time is a fundamental limitation, I suppose.

men are instinctively self centered and know it all, esp. science, there is no way man will ever, ever be able to ans. any and all ques. we are limited as people, we can never, ever reach all consciousness otherwise we'd be God, Gahndi barely scratched the surface, surface of it. we are not Gods and nor would we want to be, with wisdom comes heartache because we are surrounded in a pool of ignorance, i'm saying that it is impossible as human beings to ever reach the point of knowing just cause and most importantly to understand ourselves, because of pride, when we think we know it all, that's when we stop knowing it all. besided, man in imperfect and if you are going to ever believe man, any man, i don't care if it's Gahundi without ques. it for your self, then your as much a fool the average person. seek and you shall find, never, ever listen to imperfect beings, it's just not logical.