Updates!

Important news via The Duhem Society blog about some of Fr. Jaki's posthumous works and the statutes of a new Society. Ad multos annos!

And you may find yourself...

"…you will encounter words like 'encairned', 'decensive', 'quotha', 'perforce', 'wroth', 'guerdon', and 'aye '(used like pepper throughout the text), all of which may be summed up in Haines' funniest quote, 'Man, what art thou at?'"
-- from a review of Aurelius' Meditations at Amazom.com

It reminded me of this song, though I don't know why:



Which song reminded me of these fellows, though I have a slightly clearer reason why:

In other news, tonight as I ate my dinner I realized arguments/writings for free will before the advent of quantum indeterminacy and stochastic processes would be much more entertaining. The recent deluge of evidence for indeterminism has made things almost too easy, don't you think? Granted, elite indeterminists like Peter Van Inwagen and Robert Kane, et al.,––did Van Inwagen really coin "indeterminism"?––avoid relying on quantum indeterminacy for their accounts of freewill, which is why I respect them so much. Someone like Stanley Jaki, by contrast, entirely rejects the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and yet still defends freewill in a deterministic universe. That's my mentor, them's balls! (For the record, Jaki and I both did crew in high school.)

Determinism is held, despite the evidence, based only on the cognitive limits of our current understanding of science. "Even though a coin toss is spoken of as proabiistic, in fact, each specific coin toss has a deterministic outcome. If only we could know enough about its initial conditions, we could know its outcome exactly. We're just waiting for science to catch up with man's deepest, deterministic intuitions." The problem is that, even aside from the quantum indeterminacy we would face at the (…admittedly only currently…) lowest level of analysis, this Laplacian insight would still be subject to human finitude, since a skeptic could just as reasonably argue, "Even though a coin toss is spoken of as deterministic, in fact, each specific coin toss has a stochastic outcome. If only we could know enough about its initial conditions, we could know its outcome is probabilistic, like all of physical nature. We're just waiting for science to catch up with man's deepest, indeterministic intuitions."

Truthmakers, Mythmakers, Falsifiers, Fairies…

The Bode-Titius Law (BTL), which I cited in a recent post on Darwinism and morality, has been percolating in my mind since I encountered it in Stanley Jaki's The Relevance of Physics. It is a fascinating case study of the falsifiability of scientific claims, as well as of the question of how much heuristic 'slack' a theory should be given vis-á-vis empirical inconsistencies. Lately, the specific problem that has vexed my brain is this:

The falsifier of the BTL was the existence of Neptune, once discovered.

Yet, the (unrecognized) existence of Neptune was a truthmaking condition for the validity of the BTL.

Therefore, the existence of Neptune was both a truthmaker for and falsifier of the BTL.

(I'm not the only one who hears "B.L.T." whenever I read "BTL", am I?)

Images I have: Johann Elert Bode, with full confidence in its truth, successfully using the BTL to explain astronomical phenomena at the cutting edge of the science in his day. The planet Neptune, unknown, orbiting the sun in space, influencing the very motions of the planets being described by the BTL. Passage of time. The discovery of Neptune. The planet Neptune, now recognized, orbiting the sun in space, still influencing the motions of other planets in ways yet to be described by a later law.

If at some point humanity lost awareness of Neptune but somehow managed to salvage the BTL, would the BTL be true again? Was it ever true? Is any scientific equation ever true? Should we even speak of the Bode-Titius Law as a natural phenomenon if it could so easily be "repealed" by human cognition? If a scientific law can apply to the system called "the Milky Way", can another law not just as plausibly apply to a system called "the Milky Way without reference to this and that planet"? If laws can apply when restricted to a certain range of material objects, can they not also apply when restricted to a range of temporal units (e.g. could we not construct a "law of nature" which explains why I ordered a bacon waffle sandwich at 15:30 this afternoon but makes no mention of why anyone else ordered something nor of what I did before or after that time)?

I am, once more, a very diffident scientific realist.

Competence is as competence does?

Hoping to finish reading Hawking & Mlodinow's The Grand Design tonight. The first half is mostly just a fluffy primer of the history of science and a lot of bad jokes. Interesting to see a few 'retractations' from A Brief History of Time, but worse to see some philosophical howlers in drag (as has been covered by many able writers elsewhere). How I would have loved to see Fr Jaki's review of it.


http://www.xkcd.com/799/