Can we broaden the context of science?

[Prometheus]

Ah, post-modern gobbledegook :yuck:
Do you really think that the Romans knew a lot about beta-decay (the weak force) or about the strong nuclear force ?
This is a typical pattern of "reasoning" in postmodernism: I guess you're talking about the 4 elements of Aristoteles, and the 4 forces (gravity, strong interaction, and electroweak interaction ; eh, only 3 ?? :shy: ok, before, it was, weak interaction and electromagnetism) in modern physics.

Unfortunately, I think that your post does not deserve a serious response. Talk about gobledegook, read your own response for an excellent example of what you are talking about. You make meaningless generalizations, and then lump my statement in with them, when the only thing that is clear is that you have little idea what you are talking about in the context of my posting.

You seem so caught up in your world of hyper-generalizations that I am surprised that you came out of it to notice my post.

You make gradiose claims about beta-decay, as though somehow this has some significant relevance to my point. Do you really think that you understand my point? Do you really think that my point is so shallow that your rebuttal hits it right on the mark? Perhaps you do.

You take the 4 forces, and try to claim that they are now 3. This is a meaningless intermediate step from 4 forces to a unified force, and therefore has no relevance in this conversation, in my opinion.

I claim that the 4 forces of the ancient Greeks are structurally identical with the 4 forces of modern physics. Do you think that I am suggesting that the content is also identical, and that they used the same examples and the same terminology to exemplify these forces?

I suspect that you do not really understand what the ancient forces symbolized, and you do not know what the modern forces symbolize. You take them both at simplistic face value, and therefore see no relationship.

That is fine. Feel free. I would appreciate if you would avoid your fancy yet meaningless catch phrases in stating your point of view that attempt to lump me in with your grandiose generalizations that are superficial and convey nothing of value.

The only thing they have in common is the number 4, so we say that it is the same thing.

Are you this shallow, or are you saying that you think that I am?

Also, in christian religion, the unified god is actually 3. Like the 3 little pigs. Or the 3 forces of nature.

You are actually making a point worthy of discussion. However, I supsect that this is just a joke on your part, and that you do not recognize any serious symbolic relationships here

 

[Prometheus]

I hope I can explain what I meant and why I don't see it as a contradiction.

You example illustrates your point well. I don't quite agree with your conclusions, of course as that is the reason for this post in the first place, but I do understand your reasoning.

OK, I can handle the Japanese thing. If my memory serves me, you have to say something like "kono hito wa onisan desu" or "kono hito wa otosan desu", depending on whether your brother is older or younger than you. Point taken, the word "brother" does not exist in traditional Japanese, but still there is no loss of information when you translate the English sentence into Japanese.

You say that there is no loss of information. Doesn't that fact that the translation is not possible count for something? Furthermore, Japanese is extremely noun heavy, compared with English. Doesn't the extreme reliance on nouns possibly reflect a difference in understanding?

What you mentioned about the bible losing information, happens because translators have to worry about aesthetics as much as correctness. If someone translates a Japanese book and replaces every instance of "otosan" with "my older brother", it would be ugly and boring. But it is the translator who introduces information loss, not the translation process itself.

This is a major source of difference between us. I believe that most words in Japanese cannot be translated into a single equivalent in English and vice versa. How would you, or your friends, translate the word animal into Japanese? I will bet you that if you ask Japanese, 100% will tell you that animal in Japanese is doubutsu. This is fairly close, but is also very wrong in most cases.

That is because you think the proper translation of a word such as "onisan" is "brother", when it in fact is "a person's older brother". The Japanese word does contain more information, but that information can be just as well expressed in English, or any other language for that matter. Depending on how primitive the language is it may be tedious, but you can always do it.

But, this is missing the point, in my opinion. Such translations cannot always be done. In this extremely simple example, it is simply the fact that Japanese has more nouns, and English requires adjectives to perform some of the Japanese noun distinctions. This is a simple example, and in this case, the loss of information is not great. However, this is an extremely trivial example. When deeper cases are examined, the differences become extremely significant, in my opinion.

Did I say "every way"? I don't recall, but if I did please apologize. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about science, and I'm quite fond of the various alternative philosophies. I'm not too familiar with Chinese culture, but I do like the little I know. However, I'm trying not to allow my somewhat disdainful attitude towards materialistic science get in the way of an objective assessment, and what I do observe is that what you call the Indo-European way of thinking is, regretably I might add, quite popular around the world. I take it that when most Chinese doctors reject traditional Chinese medicine in favor of European approaches, that they know what they are doing. Personally, I'm not enthusiastic about our medicine, in fact I'm quite skeptical of it to the point of cynicism.

Western medicine is quite popular in China, but your statement that most Chinese doctors reject it in favor of European approaches is without foundation. I wonder where you got it. Doctors who go to western medical school become steeped in western techiques, and tend to reject Chinese medicine, which they neither understand or are qualified to judge in a profession manner. Doctors who study Chinese medicine, as I have done, do not consider western medicine to be superior. Doctors in China recognize that in some cases western medicine is far superior and in some cases Chinese medicine is far superior. Western medicine is very popular in China, but so is Chinese medicine. Western medicine is based on western science, whereas Chinese medicine is based on the Dao.

I do not at all mean to disagree with the idea that western science is quite popular. It is also quite successful, which contributes to why it is so popular. However, it is very different from the model of the Dao. Not all of these differences are superior, in my opinion, only different.

You know, due to the popularity of western science, a number of Chinese intellectuals have, over the past decades, developed an inferiority complex. Fortunately, this is dissipating, I believe. There are valid reasons for the popularity of western science. This should not be construed as superior in all important ways, in my opinion. The Dao is an extremely profound model of nature.

I suspect the Chinese people are open to things they cannot understand, while the modern Western-European mind is quite closed to anything it can't properly understand. But I may be wrong about the Chinese.

Although this is a reasonable interpreation to make, I think that you are jumping to interpreatations that are not fully justified. The Chinese have been open to adopt what the west has developed. They have been able to recognize the value in doing so, and they have been able to do so. The west has not been able to see the value in the Chinese model of nature. This should not be construed to be equivalent to the notion that the Chinese model is therefore inferior in most respects.

Well, my reasoning comes from the fact that physical reality doesn't change depending on how you describe it. What does change is the metaphysics, the interpretation of what is implied by our observations of the world.

And yet, our descriptions are all that we have. In English, and in western science, we have a concept known as time and another known as space. Modern physics teaches that we should think in terms of space-time, but our language grammar does not enable us to recognize this unity. It does allow us to pretend, which is what most people who use the word space-time do. The Chinese grammar makes the unity of concepts easier to grasp, because Chinese is a unified language at the most fundamental level, unlike English and the Indo-European languages.

I would agree with you that other languages can tremendously help in the development of a more solid, more consistent metaphysics. For instance, it seems to me the Chinese concepts of ying and yang seem far more sophisticated than the primitive Western notions of duality, so there's definitely something to be learned.

Excellent perception. The Chinese concepts exist at a much deeper level than the western concepts. In other words, the subdivision of the Dao into Yin and Yang occurred much earlier in the Chinese model than in the western models.

I'm just not sure what you mean by "models of nature", whether you think they should incorporate metaphysics or not.

At the most fundamental level, speakers of Indo-European languages recognize two differenct, and seemingly incompatible, models of the world, religion and science. Each of these have large numbers of adjerents who believe passionately that these models of nature can truly and accurately describe nature. Of these 2, religion is a unified model, as it has a single force, a singel god. Science is a subdivided model, as it has 4 subdivided forces of nature. Both of these models of nature are natural outgrowths of the understanding of the world of their speakers, based on the possibilties inherent in nature as reflected through the grammar of language.

Chinese is a unified language. It supports a single model of nature, which is unified, the Dao. The Dao is extremely profound, just as science and religion are profound. The Dao is very different from science and religion. The Dao is as close as the Chinese languauge gets to natively supporting a science, and it is as close as it gets to a native religion.

 

[Prometheus]

If in fact reality is Unity, we do we strive for change? When maybe we should try and maintain that which is essential and primeval?

Reality is in the form of a cycle. In the first stage, there is unity. Unity is followed by subdivision. Ultimately, subdivision must return to unity, or there would be no cycle.

Science improves with each generation. Our species improves with each generation. You children, if you have any, will have an imporved situation over yours. However, they begin their cycle of life as you do, and they will end it as you do. Without change, there could be no improvement.

 

[Prometheus]

I think that this is completely wrong.

OK

Science is based on logic (with as a corrolary mathematics) and experiment.

Interesting. I think that science and logic are both based on the grammar of our Indo-European language. Things that are logical are considered so because our language grammar supports such organization. Logic cannot be assumed to be a foundation of science, because they have the same basis, in the grammar of language.

Japanese scientists are just as good at "indo-european" physics as are British scientists, just to take an example.

Yes, this is a good example. However, do you think that it is possible that western science could ever have originated in China or Japan, or only that they are able to develop skill in utilizing and improving that which they never could have originated themselves?

BTW, it is almost impossible to write down current "models of nature" using written language alone, you need a lot of mathematics too. You can easily translate technical descriptions of these models from English to Chinese and vice versa. No information gets lost if the translation is done correctly.

True. I am a technical translator of Chinese and Japanese. Technical translations, particularly from Japanese, are the easiest of all translations to do. Most Japanese technical words are based on English, and the rest are based on Chinese. As well, writers tend to write in westen forms, because after all the content is western in scope. It takes almost no understanding of the Japanese culture to understand descriptions of atoms and molecules.

The part about "correctly" I find hard to understand. For example, consider a register in computers. I might talk about a register, or the register, or registers. In Japanese, there is no way to make a distinction, and all would be translated the same. An English-speaking reader derives information from the article and the plural, but the Japanese reader does not have access to these nuances, no matter how "well" the translation is done.

 

[vanesch]

Unfortunately, I think that your post does not deserve a serious response.

Then why do you respond to it ?

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

Interesting. I think that science and logic are both based on the grammar of our Indo-European language. Things that are logical are considered so because our language grammar supports such organization. Logic cannot be assumed to be a foundation of science, because they have the same basis, in the grammar of language.

I will of course not deny that *some form of language* is necessary to do science, or mathematics. But I think that a very rudimentary language is enough. The thing I want to argue with is that the specific grammatical structure of a language matters. It is a bit like programming languages, such as C, or fortran, or lisp, or prolog. They are "universal" in that any algorithm described in any of them can be expressed in the others (and can express any task that can be performed with a Turing machine) ; only some problems are more efficiently done in C, and others more in prolog. But it is a matter of efficiency, not of possibility.
I think that all human languages are "universal enough" to do science. In fact, you do not need much in a language to do science. You need the concept of true and false, the modus ponens (if A and if A->B then B), and something that says "sometimes" and "always", and some way of expressing "with this symbol, I mean that thing in nature", which can very primitively communicated, like repetitively pointing to the symbol, and then pointing to the thing, and saying "urgh, urgh!". You also need a few concepts like "next" and "previous". I'm probably forgetting a few things, but this should be sufficient.
Indeed, from the moment you can start writing down formal logic, which you should be able to do with the above concepts, all of mathematics can be worked out, symbolically, on paper. You don't need a single word for it! Once the mathematics is worked out, you can do physics, with the "urgh, urgh" rule. Of course it is tedious !
But it should convince you that not much is needed in principle.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

The part about "correctly" I find hard to understand.

Very simple: translate Eng->Chinese. Then translate (independently) back:
Chinese-> English. If both the source text and the final text in english are considered equivalent, it has been done correctly.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

Yes, this is a good example. However, do you think that it is possible that western science could ever have originated in China or Japan, or only that they are able to develop skill in utilizing and improving that which they never could have originated themselves?

Of course it could have evolved there. But I cannot prove it to you, because now it is a historical fact that it evolved in Europe. Take this statement: "martial arts could only develop in China and Japan, because their linguistic structure permits them to do so. Indo-European languages are unable to develop martial arts." If now westerners do karate and ju-jitsu, it is because they have learned it from asiatics, and took the vocabulary with it.
How are you going to argue against such a statement (which is obviously wrong) ?

cheers,
Patrick

 

[vanesch]

I claim that the 4 forces of the ancient Greeks are structurally identical with the 4 forces of modern physics. Do you think that I am suggesting that the content is also identical, and that they used the same examples and the same terminology to exemplify these forces?

The 4 modern interactions are:
- gravity, and the simplest manifestation of it is a falling apple.
- electromagnetism: apart from electromechanical applications, probably the best manifestation is chemistry. Chemistry is all electromagnetism.
- the strong force: keeps nucleae together, and keeps protons together, in two different manifestations.
- the weak force: very subtle, the only "natural" manifestation is in beta decay. It also plays a role in thermonuclear fusion, but only a minor one, the biggest part being due to the strong force.

In what way is this related to what the ancient greeks thought about your 4 forces, except for the fact that both are 4 in number ??
I can grant to the Ancients that they knew about falling apples and that they might have some philosophical idea of what keeps matter together and that with a grain of salt the size of an iceberg you could relate this to gravity on one hand and electromagnetism and the strong force on the other hand but I would be very surprised they knew about the weak force !

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Prometheus]

The thing I want to argue with is that the specific grammatical structure of a language matters.

I think that all human languages are "universal enough" to do science. In fact, you do not need much in a language to do science.

I do not disagree with your point that all languages can "do" science. I do disagree that all human languages are universal enough to develop science as it was developed by speakers of Indo-European languages.

The original science of the ancient Greeks developed 4 elements, and as well 4 forces. We still recognize 4 forces in physics. Is this a coincidence? Is it a coincidence that Indo-Europeans subdivide so much of nature into groups of 4? Could this possibly have anything to do with the grammar that encourages such subdivision?

Chinese could never have developed a science based on 4 elements, because the grammar of Chinese subdivides nature into groups of 5. Chinese recognizes 5 elements, etc.

 

[Prometheus]

Very simple: translate Eng->Chinese. Then translate (independently) back:
Chinese-> English. If both the source text and the final text in english are considered equivalent, it has been done correctly.

I get it. If you are willing to let all of the differences slide, and "consider" the translations to be "equivalent", then you can label it as correct.

I think that you and I have a very different view on how possible it is to translate well between English and Chinese. Have you ever tried it? In trivial cases or in scientific cases, I agree that the translations can have the appearance of great similarity.

 

[Prometheus]

The 4 modern interactions are:
- gravity
- electromagnetism
- the strong force
- the weak force

In what way is this related to what the ancient greeks thought about your 4 forces, except for the fact that both are 4 in number ??

Why do you call them my 4 forces?

This is not an easy discussion to hold, both because the topic is complex and because you do not really seem to be receptive to the idea.

Let me begin, however, but not discuss all 4 forces.

The ancient Greeks recognized 4 forces, known as hot, cold, wet, and dry.

Cold is a force that is analogous to gravity. Both are forces that cause attraction, such that what is separate comes together. The ancient Greeks did not develop a theory on the nature of gravity on the basis of the force of Cold, yet one of their 4 forces has the same fundamental properties as one of the 4 modern forces. If it is cold, then 2 people will huddle together as 1. This is a type of analogy that demonstrates that, symbolically, awareness of the same relationship in nature was at work. Of course it is to a much lower level of sophistication, but do you recognize any similarity in the structure of the idea?

Hot is the force that is analogous to electro-magnetism. Whereas Cold causes attraction, Hot causes repulsion and separation. When it is hot, people move a lot and apart. Attraction and repulsion are the nature of electro-magnetism.

Just as with the 2 nuclear forces, wet and dry are much more complex to discuss.

Do you see any relationship with the ancient forces from what I said here, do you think that this is just coincidence, do you think this irrelevant, or what do you think?

 

[vanesch]

Why do you call them my 4 forces?

The ancient Greeks recognized 4 forces, known as hot, cold, wet, and dry.

This is what I thought you were after,but these are the 4 ELEMENTS, not the 4 FORCES. So I asked you because I wanted to be sure. For one, they were not seen as INTERACTIONS, but as CONSTITUENTS of all that be. Earth, wind, water and fire. Aristotle, as far as I understood, DID NOT consider "interactions". He had a classification of "forces" in that each object wanted to go to its "natural place" and had an "inner drive" to do so. But this was not related to the 4 elements.
Honestly, what you write about cold force, and getting together and so on, is to me nothing else but poetic allegory (which I do not say in a condescendent way). I maintain that the only thing the 4 elements and the 4 forces have in common, on a naive, first degree level (the only one that counts!) is the number 4. All the rest is poetry: games of words, stretched analogies etc... that surely amuse the educated, and testify of the creativity of the author :-) But it is, as you say, lost on me, who is a naive person who can recognize eventually a second degree, but doesn't think it means anything beyond amuzement for the educated :-)

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

In trivial cases or in scientific cases, I agree that the translations can have the appearance of great similarity.

EXACTLY. You understand that the use of language for scientific purposes can be reduced to a very rudementary level, which you almost equate with "trivial". Translating texts related to "human sciences" is much, much harder, because there, the machinery of language is used to a much greater extend.
Hence my thesis: all human languages (except maybe a few Eskimo dialects who only can talk about snow :-) must contain a universal enough communication kernel for the rudimentary level needed for scientific purposes to come to expression. And so what can be expressed on that level doesn't depend on that language and cannot greatly influence the kind of science done with it. Culture has a much bigger influence than linguistics.

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[vanesch]

Is it a coincidence that Indo-Europeans subdivide so much of nature into groups of 4? Could this possibly have anything to do with the grammar that encourages such subdivision?

Ok, so you are starting to agree with me what I pointed out earlier: that the only thing the 4 elements, and the 4 modern forces have in common, is their number :-)

I need some clarifications. First of all, what, in indo-european grammar, attaches an importance to the number 4 ? If I remember Chomsky (long ago I learned about it) it is more a subdivision in 2, no ?

Next, what else, except the 4 elements, and the 4 forces, comes in bunches of 4 and is to be seen as absolutely fundamental to the development of physics ?

Finally, then, if this is so crucial to the development of physics, how come that these "4 modern forces" have only been 4 for a few decennia ? :-) Indeed, up to the 18th century, one thought that there was only 1 force: gravity. In the 19th century, only 2 forces were known: gravity and electromagnetism. In fact, 3 forces: gravity, electricity and magnetism. The nuclear forces (strong and weak) were added at the beginning of the century, and by the 1960ies, it was recognized that the weak force by itself didn't make sense and had to be unified with electromagnetism in order to make sense (technically: to be renormalizable).
It is maybe not clear to you, but the "weak force" as such doesn't make sense by itself, in the same way that "magnetism" doesn't make sense without electricity. It was just that people _experimentally_ noted peculiar behaviour that they classified as something new, only to be realized much later that the thing by itself didn't make sense.
So it is only between about 1900 and about 1960 that we had 4 forces.
Since about 1960, we have 3 forces again. And we notice that the thing doesn't really make sense, so we have more like 1 force on one hand (gravity) and 2 others on the other hand, which we cannot consider at the same time.
But happily, the two domains of application are widely separated, so for every situation, one of both can be applied.
I really, really don't see where grammar comes in here !

cheers,
Patrick.

 

[Dayle Record]

Science would have been my choice for a lifetime, if it had not been so limiting. Today I look at where science stands, out there on the edges of infinity, and there they are laughing and flying paper airplanes, barbequing the ionosphere, covering up the abuses of their employers, and creating a perpetual motion machine, that barely fixes (on a continuing basis), the gross errors caused by inborn flaws of the guiding logic of the whole process. Here are some examples of what I mean.

Use of the scientific method to allow highly mutagenic substances to enter the biosphere, for profit=Cancer and illness=Cancer research to find highly toxic substances to cure the Cancer, caused by ethical failures in the Scientific and Corporate culture. The big donators to cancer research get big tax breaks for these donations, they look great, a great example of this whole dynamic would be Huntsman Chemical/Huntsman Cancer Research.

There are all kinds of scientists, but scientists all work for someone, who bankrolls their research. Most often the entity that stands to profit the most, funds the research, or buys the results of research, for whatever use they choose; even if it is to own patents and shelve them.

If you break down our budget you will see that we are a society driven by fear(defense), and profit motive(defense). Then there are the other big motivators social fear(the cosmetics and fashion industry), fear fear(the religious industry), and release from fear(the drug industry). If we as a society were all about inquisitiveness, or joy, or peace, or continuity; we would look at the nature of things in an entirely different way.

Each of us may feel as if we aren't fearful, or we aren't greedy, we are free citizens of the western world. The larger entities that we serve, are all these things, because it is profit they fear for . So without some universal vision, like the Dao, that drives Daoists, not necessarily all Chines people we are just victims of the weakest impulses of society at large. You see we are not a democracy, we are a republic. So we are governed by the haves, and the haves weren't content with their portion of the all, they had to have more. This sort of value system is inherently out of line with the reality of the chemical reaction that is life on this planet.

Life happened because of a minimal opportunity for it to happen. Then it proceeded in the most minute of gains, over a very long period of time. This was all very delicately balanced, minimimalist on a grand scale. The human genome project established that within the last 50,000 years, the human population was at some point ~2,500 individuals. Things come up, in this world, unexpected things, that abruptly change everything.

The Dao of this is nothing. Whatever happened, happened. We may have not lost our appreciation for the natural scheme of things, but there is definitely no way for ungovernable corporate entities, to be in that perfect moment, in such a way that they behave well. Their appreciation of the Dao comes in the quarterly dividend, in the profit and loss statement, this overrides any and all other considerations. All those charities and other niceties that they indulge in, are just helping with the bottom line. If these gifts interfered with the bottom line in any way, they would not exist.

Here is an example. My 16 year old daughter was offered a job at the University Of Utah, for the summer. She would make some money, and get a good job reference. The reality is that those jobs were available, if her father were able to donate $1,000 to the University. Now a poor kid, would not be able to get a job, if his father could not donate, and the father that donates, gets a $1,000 tax break for his donation, and the money comes right back to his child. He didn't donate, nor did he pay her the money she couldn't make. This is inherently out of balance, we are terribly out of balance as a society, in terms of the Dao.

I assure you that if the Dao gets in the way of this system, this system will kick its ... and continue right on down the sidewalk. At least for now. Time wounds all heels, that beat on this sidewalk, however. As long as we are dominated by negative possibilities, we won't be in the positive range for more than a few minutes on payday. We are apparently all about the Dow, 'round here, vs the Dao, and it is a pity. I have to say, though, that even the poorest farmers in this Dowist society, are a million miles ahead of the Daoist Chinese farmers, who seem to victims of slow genocide. These values need to mesh, somewhere so that the huge wave that describes the wealthiest and the poorest, flattens out somewhat takes on a higher frequency, and moves more toward the spectrum of light, rather than the gigantic ELF curve it is. This big wave of our disparity, translates to a very sad note in a long sad song.