Salvaging Science

[Dave Rogers]

Non fossil fuel sources simply can't take up the slack to power an energy intensive industrial based consumption culture/economic system.

The total power incident on the Earth from sunlight is nearly ten thousand times the average power consumption rate from all human activity. Current non fossil fuel sources may not be enough, but fortunately science and technology have not yet discovered everything it's possible to know.

Dave

 

[Dave Rogers]

Just as logic stayed in regular use long after the hope of using logical analysis to understand the whole universe failed, I expect the scientific method to find plenty of practical uses long after we get over the fantasy that everything can be explained by quantitative tests in which all other variables can be controlled.

When, exactly, did the hope of using logical analysis to understand the whole universe fail? What failed, as I understand it, was the belief that the universe could be extrapolated from self-evident axioms; in other words, the belief that experimental knowledge was not necessary to understand physical laws. We fixed this, not by abandoning logic, but by finding better axioms. What we found out, as a species, is that the best way to understand the universe is to study it and extrapolate from the results of that study. And it seems to me that the spiritualists have never accepted this decision, and are trying to return to an age before empirical analysis, where the ultimate truths of the universe can be worked out simply by looking inwards, and never having to bother with the unsavoury details of getting their hands dirty by actually doing something.

In other words, the change you're trying to advocate will take us in the wrong direction.

Dave

 

[Roboramma]

I wasn't talking about pleasure though.

You say you weren't, but you don't make clear the difference between "spiritual well being" and "well being". I'm pretty sure that the things that you refer to when you say "spiritual well being" are the same things I refer to when I talk about "well being".

If you think that's not true, feel free to give me a specific example.

As for assuming it's conclusion, that's kind of the point. Science is ill equipped, and incapable of explaining matters that are non scientific.

You've still so far failed to give me an example of something that science can't explain.

Again, are you aware of "scientism"? You're practicing it now.

Yes, I know what scientism is.

 

[Jeff Corey]

I wasn't talking about pleasure though.

As for assuming it's conclusion, that's kind of the point. Science is ill equipped, and incapable of explaining matters that are non scientific. Again, are you aware of "scientism"? You're practicing it now.

I think that most of the posters here know what "scientism" is. The science of behavior is often attacked on the grounds that, "You can't use scientific methods to determine the causes of behavior because people have free will",
Balderdash.
And of course science can't study "souls", or fairys or ghosts or other imaginary entities.

 

[Roboramma]

Well, I haven't predicted a demise of civilization soon. I've espoused (like Greer) a long descent. We can talk details of that though if you'd like.

Um:

No, I don't. As I said, that's up for our descendants to figure out, after the inevitable 400 to 500 dark age that is looming soon.

My bolding.

TFian, soon was your word. When lionking asks you "how soon" you reply that you never said it would happen soon?

Okay...

 

[Roboramma]

By the way TFian, regarding computers and "industrial civilization", here's a couple of good posts from that "will the internet survive..." thread:

Um. We had, like, ten pages of discussion of exactly this point.

Computers don't take that much power to make. They don't take that much materials. A tiny, tiny fraction of already-existing renewable infrastructure (hydro, geothermal, solar) would be sufficient to run future fabs, and that's true as a profit-loss calculation as well as a simple power budget. Shipping is trivial because computers are very small.

We gave you numbers on each of these points. Power, renewables, shipping, and profit-motivation. We can do materials next if you insist, but first please click back ten pages in this thread and reread it.

I also want to point out: Rare earths? For computers? Not a bit of it. Rare earths are used for color applications---CRT phosphors, some colored LEDs---but otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with the innards of a computer. Not the silicon, not the solder, not the dopants, not the interconnects, not the motherboard, etc.

The current push for rare-earths is driven by high-end permanent magnet motors---nowadays used in electric cars, wind turbines, and (say) hard drives, but you can do without them. You can do all of these things with AlNiCo, a perfectly fine permanent magnet. (You just need 2x as much volume of it to do the job of an NdFeB.)

For a device like an iPhone, with no hard drive, I bet that the only rare earths in the whole thing are in the speaker magnets. Will high-quality earbud speakers survive energy contraction?

 

[KingMerv00]

Yes. Eventually we'll realize science has it's limits, and embark on another means, pilled onto of science and logic, to understand the universe around us.

Saying that science is limiting is like saying that a space shuttle is limiting while in orbit. You are free to step outside anytime but you won't like the results.

Get back to me the moment any other system of belief discovers something new about the universe in a repeatable way.

 

[arthwollipot]

Link wlcm.

Tks.

Of course there's other forms of energy generation, they existed far before the fossil fuel powered industrial revolution. The problem is, and this is an important detail, is that fossil fuels are necessary for industrial civilization to function.

What a load of rubbish. 1 kilowatt hour from coal is identical to one kilowatt hour from solar. Or tidal. Or wind. All of which we wouldn't have if not for science.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Lots of rubbish here, Art.

 

[arthwollipot]

Lots of rubbish here, Art.

I can't find it in me to disagree with that.

 

[PixyMisa]

Yes. Eventually we'll realize science has it's limits, and embark on another means, pilled onto of science and logic, to understand the universe around us.

Sure it has limits. However, nothing else works at all.

What is that next step?

There isn't one.

we've got a dark age to get through first

No, that's just you. The rest of us will be fine, thanks.

After that, our descendants can worry about creating the next useful toolkit for human thought.

We already have that. It's called "science".

 

[PixyMisa]

Matters of the soul for one.

Doesn't exist.

Are you aware of the term "scientism"?

Yes, it's a lame excuse for lack of evidence commonly bandied about by believers in things that don't exist.

 

[PixyMisa]

The total power incident on the Earth from sunlight is nearly ten thousand times the average power consumption rate from all human activity. Current non fossil fuel sources may not be enough, but fortunately science and technology have not yet discovered everything it's possible to know.

Actually, current non-fossil sources will do fine; they're just more expensive and/or less convenient than fossil fuels.

No doom for you, TFian.

 

[Myriad]

Let me start with a few general comments.

1. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I like Greer. Almost always there is something insightful in every one of his blog posts. Thus, he would have no difficulty passing the test that the Truthers could not, in the "Lost in Space" thread. That does not mean I agree with everything he says, or even with his key thematic points. But I find his writings to be far from "ranting" and usually worth reading.

2. As I've mentioned elsewhere, one must be careful in Greer/TFian threads to distinguish between Greer's claims and TFian's embellishments and projections of them. Do not assume that the latter are in any way sourced in the former, or correctly represent the intentions or general thrust of the former. In the "Internet Survive... Energy Contraction" thread I was fortunate to be able to set some correspondents straight in that certain racist beliefs being discussed in the thread did not come from Greer. In this case, I find in Greer's post no mention of any wooish new-age future mode of thought to replace or transcend science. Maybe Greer does believe in something like that but the blog post under discussion doesn't say so. Quite the contrary; here is the example Greer offers of "salvaged science" for a post-collapse world:

...It would take little more than a microscope, a notebook, and a camera to do some very precise studies of the effect of organic gardening methods on soil microorganisms, beneficial and harmful insects, and crop yields, or to settle once and for all the much-debated question of whether adding biochar to garden soil has any benefits in temperate climates.

These are things the green wizards of the future are going to need to be able to figure out.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

The overall scenario is speculative (drawn using Greer's standard pastoralist colorforms set) but the philosophy is very fundamentally scientific. Investigate to determine what works.

When speaking so generally about "science" there are at least four different popular meanings of the word, that must be distinguished between:

1. Science as a body of knowledge. Does "the end of science" mean that knowledge will be lost? Greer doesn't seem to be saying so. If he is, he's wrong (analogies with the fall of ancient Greece and Rome omitting two very important elements: movable type, and flash RAM).

2. Science as a methodology; natural philosophy; the scientific method. Does "the end of science" mean some superior methodology -- meditation, perhaps -- will replace it? Greer doesn't seem to be saying so. He doesn't seem to be suggesting using magic spells to ask the garden spirits whether or not they want biochar.

3. Applied science. In a hypothetical post-collapse, some scientific knowledge might go from directly practically applicable to not directly practically applicable. Can't make Bose-Einstein Condensates if lasers and diffusion pumps are too expensive for anyone to afford. But so what? That's true of a lot of current scientific knowledge and even some whole fields already. Geologists can discuss the mechanisms of plate tectonics and apply that knowledge without pushing crustal plates around themselves. Since the biochar example Greer offers of salvaged post-collapse science is clearly tailored to an application, cessation of such application doesn't seem to be what "the end of science" means either.

4. Science as an economic sector. Especially, what is sometimes called "big science." That seems to be what Greer is calling for the end of. Amateurs rather than professionals, as he puts it.

So really, what's the most fundamental difference between a particle physicist today and our post-collapse gardener with a microscope? It's not the basic philosophy or methodology. It's not that the gardener has less established knowledge to begin from. It's not the relative cost to society of the pursuit (keeping in mind that to be consistent with what's previously been said about that post-collapse scenario, a microscope would be either enormously expensive, priceless, or completely unobtainable).

What is it, then? It's that the gardner who happens to have access to a precious microscope is not being paid for using it. He or she is doing it for the good of the community.

Which is all already a standard part of Greer's scenario. Everybody's in small communities doing everything for favors or a share of the crops or (at their most mercenary) for barter. So saying that scientists will be non-professionals in his post-collapse scenario in which everyone is non-professionals, is about as insightful as saying that scientists tend to obey the government in North Korea or that scientists will get sick if there's a global pandemic.

With that much understood, there are a few things about science today that Greer seems to be overlooking. I'll get to those in a later post.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[TFian]

2. As I've mentioned elsewhere, one must be careful in Greer/TFian threads to distinguish between Greer's claims and TFian's embellishments and projections of them. Do not assume that the latter are in any way sourced in the former, or correctly represent the intentions or general thrust of the former. In the "Internet Survive... Energy Contraction" thread I was fortunate to be able to set some correspondents straight in that certain racist beliefs being discussed in the thread did not come from Greer.

Woah there, that's quite a bit going too far to call them "embellishments". As for the "racist" example, I never once in that thread cited they were Greer's beliefs, and in fact, I recall, quite vividly saying they were not. I use Greer's post as a launch pad, and yes, to discuss the points and ideas thereof, but I also interject my own beliefs of course, because after all, I am a different person. If the readers are too stupid to realize the difference, that's not really my problem, since I directly link to each article anyway so the readers themselves can see if I'm "embellishing" or fabricating anything. As for any "embellishments" in this thread, I think you're again way over exaggerating. I'll point to below.

In this case, I find in Greer's post no mention of any wooish new-age future mode of thought to replace or transcend science. Maybe Greer does believe in something like that but the blog post under discussion doesn't say so.

I assume you're referring to when I said in this thread that about "something else" as the next step of determining truth in our world. It isn't an "embellishment" though, it's in fact, straight from the horses mouth (Greer). Don't believe me?

As for the "next step" -- we've got a dark age to get through first, and the long period of reassessment and recovery that such ages involve. After that, our descendants can worry about creating the next useful toolkit for human thought.

I should have probably made it clear I directly derived it from Greer, but I figured it wouldn't be a problem. Source = http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot....howComment=1312514194822#c4690232155751602011

Keep in mind, neither Greer or I predict some "wooish new age" mode of thought that prevail in the future, in fact, we both give no specifics, but believe it's up to our descendants after the dark age to figure this out.

1. Science as a body of knowledge. Does "the end of science" mean that knowledge will be lost? Greer doesn't seem to be saying so.

I didn't say that either, nor did Greer of course. The title of the thread is "salvaging science", so yeah, it's about what can be preserved, which won't be everything, but not nothing.

3. Applied science. In a hypothetical post-collapse, some scientific knowledge might go from directly practically applicable to not directly practically applicable. Can't make Bose-Einstein Condensates if lasers and diffusion pumps are too expensive for anyone to afford.

Which is also what I directly said in this thread, that the tools that require fossil fueled powered industrial civilization to make scientific discoveries is in fact in jeopardy, so those fields will not be approachable by science anymore, at least in a conventional sense.

4. Science as an economic sector. Especially, what is sometimes called "big science." That seems to be what Greer is calling for the end of. Amateurs rather than professionals, as he puts it.

Which I made abundantly clear throughout this thread, it's not my fault the posters here let their prejudice against anything that doesn't fit into the narrow view of Dawkins style scientism any room for consideration.

It seems all you did was paraphrase everything I was saying in the thread (which were direct interpretations of Greer's post) and make it more clear and readable to the thread goers, so for that I will thank you.

With that much understood, there are a few things about science today that Greer seems to be overlooking. I'll get to those in a later post.

Respectfully,
Myriad

Look forward to reading it.

 

[JadeStonesFromSaturn]

In this case, I find in Greer's post no mention of any wooish new-age future mode of thought to replace or transcend science. Maybe Greer does believe in something like that but the blog post under discussion doesn't say so.

That might be true for the post in question, but I think you give the "Archdruid" far too much credit Myriad. I don't think he's as scientifically attuned as you might think. Have you by any chance read this interview by the Wiccan Pagan Times? There's a quote there that I find kind of interesting (and revealing)

How did we lose our connection to the magical dimensions of everyday life? That's going to require a little bit of a history lesson.

Three hundred and fifty years ago we had something called the Scientific Revolution. It's too rarely realized that this was a revolution in the political sense. First in Britain, then in other countries in Europe and Europe's colonies, power passed from landed aristocrats and kings to business interests. What we call "modern science" was the ideology of the new ruling class: a worldview in which nothing exists except matter and energy, in which nature is nothing but raw material, religion is purely psychological, and magic is impossible. It's the perfect belief system for a world in which money is the prime source of political power.
The interesting thing is that nobody ever actually proved scientifically that magic doesn't work, that spirits and gods don't exist, or any of the other things paraded as definite fact by the publicists of modern science. You can test magic by experiment...but the experiments weren't done. The promoters of the Scientific Revolution simply insisted loudly and repeatedly that magic had to be impossible, and that was that. When Rupert Sheldrake did a few experiments on nonphysical causation a few years back and published the results, the editors of the very prestigious British science magazine _Nature_ called for his book to be burnt. Sheldrake committed what, in scientific terms, is the ultimate sin: he'd subjected the basic assumptions of science itself to experimental test, and showed that they don't hold water.

Most people on JREF probably are familiar with Sheldrake, so I don't really need to expound there. His interpretation of the scientific revolution also come off as a new age conspiracy theory of sorts. Overall this to me, seems pretty newagey and wooish. I think when he got into the peak oil scene, and donned his cap as the guru of Peak Oil, he simply very much downplayed his new age image so he wouldn't be easily dismissed as nonsensical.

This also leaves me suspect.

In 2002 I started trying to work out the philosophical implications of a universe with many gods, and ended up writing a book about it. What I discovered is that the case for polytheism is very strong; if you compare it to either monotheism or atheism, polytheism makes more sense, begs fewer questions, and offers more plausible explanations of things like human religious experience.

And

Sacred geometry is another subject that used to be required study for magicians and is mostly forgotten these days. Magicians use pentagrams, for example, because the geometrical relationships that form a pentagram have certain predictable magical effects. There are many other geometrical figures with powers of their own. That's become a major interest of mine, since there has been very little work done on the subject in the last three hundred years.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but my woo senses are tingling after reading that interview.

So saying that scientists will be non-professionals in his post-collapse scenario in which everyone is non-professionals, is about as insightful as saying that scientists tend to obey the government in North Korea or that scientists will get sick if there's a global pandemic.

With said "post collapse" scenario far from proven....

 

[dafydd]

s, but believe it's up to our descendants after the dark age to figure this out.



.

Which dark age would this be?

 

[dafydd]

I can't see any reason for the need to salvage science.

sal·vage
n.
1.
a. The rescue of a ship, its crew, or its cargo from fire or shipwreck.
b. The ship, crew, or cargo so rescued.
c. Compensation given to those who voluntarily aid in such a rescue.
2.
a. The act of saving imperiled property from loss.
b. The property so saved.
3. Something saved from destruction or waste and put to further use.
tr.v. sal·vaged, sal·vag·ing, sal·vag·es
1. To save from loss or destruction.
2. To save (discarded or damaged material) for further use.

When was science destroyed? It seems to be thriving. The thread title should have been 'Changing science to fit my view of the world.'

 

[Myriad]

It seems all you did was paraphrase everything I was saying in the thread (which were direct interpretations of Greer's post) and make it more clear and readable to the thread goers, so for that I will thank you.

Well, not quite all, but yes, clarity is one of my goals in such discussion (and often the most elusive one). I can see in hindsight how the opening couple of paragraphs could be interpreted as a sort of promise to contradict or disagree with everything you said, but that was not my intended meaning.

Now, I was working on some detailed discussion of the actual practices of the "science sector" and contrasting them to Greer's idea of them. But in the end a few simple points should communicate the ideas better. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Greer's frequent analogy is spot on: the current industrialized world is just like the Roman Empire on the verge of its decline and fall.

An expected result of such a fall would be that big-budget scientific endeavors, such as particle accelerators, space missions, the successors to the human genome project, and big computing projects like Watson would no longer be possible.

The problem with calling that "the end of science" is that such experiments and projects are to science what lavish Roman orgies were to sex. Just the showiest and most expensive examples of the practice.

The hypothetical collapse would be the end of science in exactly the same way that the fall of Rome was the end of sex.

Most real science, like most real sex, is and always has been conducted as best as possible with limited time, limited budget, and a limited pool of available personnel from whom to select the most qualified. There is no rationale for expecting that to change.

----------

JadeStonesFromSaturn, your points about Greer are well taken. The reason I don't pay much attention to those writings, and that they don't bother me much, is that in every case where Greer is talking about actual solutions to actual problems, ideas like spirits and sacred geometry are absent. I can and do disagree with many of his predictions of what problems are going to occur, when, and why, and I can and do disagree that many of his proposed solutions are the best ones. But the solutions he describes do seem to be motivated by practical and logical thinking. I could make the analogy of discussing evolution with a biologist who is also a practicing (but not fundamentalist) Christian. I pretty much already know how they reconcile those beliefs with the evolutionary science, but even if I had no idea, it still wouldn't matter to me as long as the evolutionary science is sound.

Greer is welcome to speculate about revolutionary changes in human thought that can only occur in the unspecified distant future that cannot be predicted because they can only take place after an opaque dark age is passed through. Ironically, this is very similar to the transhumanists' ideas of unpredictable revolutionary changes taking place following a similarly opaque future "singularity." Only the predicted time scale is different. What makes it ironic is Greer's clear disdain for the ideas of transhumanism.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[arthwollipot]

Okay, so we've got someone who doesn't agree with science, doesn't do science, isn't interested in science and disagrees with the fundamental premises of science, saying that science is dying.

Why should we pay attention to this person again?