Today I am going to articulate and defend a position in philosophy of science called scientific realism, which says that science is about finding truth.
In the context of our modern theories of physics, the idea that “science is about finding truth” is actually a bit provocative and a throwback to the perception of science prior to the invention of quantum mechanics.
In the last century, the scientific realist position has been undergoing something of a mass extinction event, due to quantum mechanics, a theory that unravels many philosophical assumptions if we are to accept it.
I am a “scientific realist.” This holds that the goal of science is to give us a literally true story of what the world is like, and to accept a scientific theory is to believe that the theory is true.
From the scientific realist point of view, science - and more broadly, knowledge in general - is about truth; the knowledge we obtain from experience is the result of the interaction between our consciousness and the natural world.
This position can be broken out into a few chief tenants that relate to distinct subtopics in philosophy:
In metaphysics - the nature of reality - the scientific realist holds that the natural world exists, and does so independently of our consciousness of it.
In epistemology - the nature of knowledge - the scientific realist holds that because our consciousness is in contact with the natural world by way of sensations and perceptions (faculties which are themselves natural things) our cognitive faculty is well-equipped to come to know the natural world, with enough hard work and clear reasoning.
In semantics - the meaning of language - the realist holds that the words we use to describe nature are literal and refer to things that exist in the natural world.
In ontology - what exists in reality - the scientific realist holds that the natural world consists of entities composed from substances (‘things’ made of ‘stuff’). Scientific realists do not allow mathematical abstractions to exist as objects per se, but natural laws and relationships belong to the nature of substances.
In the nature of science - scientific knowledge is ordinary knowledge taken to a higher level of precision and refinement. This means there is no special cognitive process for science.
So let’s contrast this now to some conflicting positions on these topics.
A position closely related to scientific realism is “scientific empiricism.” An empiricist would say that a scientific theory is not designed to be true. It is only designed to be useful until it proves empirically inadequate and is replaced, which all theories inevitably are.
A position that we might call “skeptical empiricism” would say that: We don’t really know anything for sure. Even the most tried and true laws of nature are subject to revision. Just something has been true in the past doesn’t mean it will be true in the future.
A position we call “idealism” would say: Perceptions are not reality. The things we think we know about the world are not derived from nature, but from the way we think. We don’t know anything about the real world.
Going a step further, the “phenomenologist” would say that: There is no ultimate reality beyond our sensations - no natural universe outside of our skulls to be known, so nothing is either true or false in principle. Instead, we live in a sea of sensations.
Finally, there is a position we may call the “semantic anti-realist or phenomenologist.” When we talk about nature, we are not talking about the natural universe anyway. We are only using words that act as placeholders for sensory experiences, and when we utter a word referring to them, we can easily replace it in the sentence with a long list of observations.
Of course, our best theories are not always true. We often find that our empirical theories are wrong or in need of refinement. Wrong ideas don’t become less wrong because of all knowledge is somehow fundamentally flawed.
Similarly, correct ideas - those confirmed empirically - are always subject to revision in the future - they don’t become less true today because they are contingent on experience. In neither case do we require a footnote with a disclaimer to remind us of this, unless something is particularly speculative.
Quantum mechanics creates a lot of problems for the scientific realist.
For starters, quantum mechanics describes the behavior of particles with the “wavefunction,” which is problematic to interpret from a realist point of view. The wavefunction is a statistical understanding of a particle, but it can behave in a way that seems to give it material reality. It can also act instantaneously across space and creates a fuzzy interpretation of classical causality.
Quantum theory sometimes requires the use of multiple conflicting models or inconsistent dualities to solve conjugate parameters of the same physical system, making it impossible to visualize the system intuitively, as a whole. In general, this approach results in mathematical treatments of problems without a clear underlying physical meaning.
The Realist Argument
Scientific realism, or “realism” in general, is built on the metaphysical premise that the content of cognition is derived from external objects in a natural world that is independent of consciousness, and made accessible to us by way of our senses and perceptions.
Scientific realists start from this point of view, and find easily that we have good reason to be optimistic about our use of science and reason to come to know truth. But it all ties back to the basic premise.
How do we prove it? It’s funny, because you can’t, but every attempt to deny it is flawed, because it assumes what one is trying to disprove.
Descartes was perhaps the first of the modern era to seriously grapple with the problem of scientific truth. In his attempt to secure all knowledge on a foundation of certainty, he felt that the only proposition he could not deny was that he was conscious (“I think, therefore I am.”) This was true regardless of whether any of the specifics of his empirical experience was true.
However, Descartes did not formally recognize a corollary, that to be conscious is to be aware that there exists a natural world, in which one exists. The statement “I am, therefore the world is” is undeniable regardless of anything else you might chose not to believe - it is direct knowledge of the world.
Descartes felt it was possible (though not probable) that there was no correspondence between the ideas in his mind, and the world. For Descartes, consciousness is given representations of the world, but does not have direct access to the world itself. There is a veil of perception between them. For Descartes, it falls to empirical argument to determine if representations formed on our side of this veil can be trusted.
Locke, who felt he could better fortify knowledge from the skepticism of Descartes, argued that the mind was a tabula rasa on which the mechanism of the senses makes impressions by way of a causal physical process.
According to Locke, knowledge can be trusted because it is the result of a natural process. But if this is to fortify our metaphysical position, we would need to presuppose that our awareness of these processes can be trusted. It would assume what Locke is attempting to prove.
Locke’s arguments were easily defeated by others who challenged how we would test the correspondence of our ideas with reality if we did not have a god-like awareness, a bird’s eye view on the situation outside our own heads. From inside our own heads, we could not obtain any empirical proof to show that our consciousness was not universally fooled.
It is worth asking what, aside from the world outside our skulls, could provide us with the content for our consciousness?
While the idealists and phenomenologists make suggestions, I find these all miserable substitutions for the existence of a natural world. It is only through our interaction with the natural world that we have the slightest ability to theorize about it, and even in denying it, we are forced to accept it is there.
The Idealism of Kant and Mach
Immanuel Kant disagreed with Locke; he felt that our sense organs could be fallible, and in order to know anything for sure, we would need to bypass them. Since this is impossible, he concluded that the world we experience is artificial. We only have access to “appearances,” not the real world, the “thing in itself.”
“things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, that is, representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses”
Kant’s position accepted a total separation between consciousness and the natural world. This position is called “idealism,” and later philosophers took the next step, questioning how we knew that the natural world was there at all, if we were forever disconnected from it.
One of these was Ernst Mach, who believed, similar to Kant, that the mind structures its own reality, focusing on that which we are capable of representing, and doing so only in ways that are important or useful to us.
After reading Kant, Mach decided (like Hegel) that the role the “thing-in-itself” plays in Kant's philosophy was superfluous. Mach argued that we are under the illusion that the things around us are made of stuff, when in fact they are aggregates of sense experiences only. Mach believed that all that exists are appearances, and sensations are the fundamental constituents of reality.
“Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies”
According to Mach, our minds are swimming in a sea of sensations, and the more we seek to understand them, the more we discover that there is nothing there but more sensations, nothing solid to grab on to. To reach out into the world was only to reach deeper within.
The Quantum Theory
In Germany, Mach’s views were synthesized by young physicists Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Pascual Jordan, and Wolfgang Pauli (who was, in fact, Ernst Mach’s godson) into a principle, called “Mach’s Principle.”
As Heisenberg later recalled, it said:
“real things are those which you can observe, and everything else has no meaning.”
The goal of these young physicists was to construct a new theory of the atom in terms of “observables,” things which can be seen and measured. The actual movements of the electron in the atom was not observable, but you could use spectroscopic equipment to observe the light produced by the electron’s jumps between orbits.
The principle was a synthesis of two elements from Mach's philosophy:
First, a general skepticism of what cannot be directly observed. How do you know that something you can’t see is really there or behaves the way you think it does?
Second, a theoretical definition must be operational to be meaningful. All you need to know is enough to calculate numbers observed in experiments, anything else is inessential theoretical jargon.
As Born expressed it:
“the principle states that concepts and representations that do not correspond to physically observable facts are not to be used in theoretical description.”
In 1925, Heisenberg, starting on his own, and then working closely with Born and Jordan, developed a theory that replaced numbers that represented physical properties of the electron in the atom with numbers that could be measured directly from experiments. The scheme produced a correct calculation of the light emission from hydrogen, but had little or no reference to underlying physics.
Erwin Schrodinger, working independently on the problem of the atom, used physical reasoning from the analogy with waves to develop a model that was found to be mathematically equivalent to Heisenberg’s.
Although Schrodinger had wanted to model the electron using as well-known mechanical equation used to describe waves, it didn’t work, so he tried an equation used for modeling heat diffusion. Imagined this way, the electron was a static cloud of electron density diffusing outward from the atom in all directions, like fog illuminated by a street lamp. He called it the “mechanical field scalar.”
If Schrodinger’s model was interpreted as a realist theory, there were serious problems with the application of classical physical laws. Since the electron appeared as a point in many experiments, Born suggested that Schrodinger’s equation (what came to have the misnomer of “wavefunction” although it wasn’t waving) in fact described the probability of finding a point-like electron within a field of possibilities.
This interpretation, still taught today, suggests that the equation governing the motion of the electron, a point-like particle, is a statistical distribution of possible states, a probability density cloud.
When the electron is measured in an experiment, the electron is found at one point because the measurement causes the wavefunction to collapse. But where is the electron, really, before being measured?
Born sought only an operational theory, not a description of nature. The purpose of the theory was to tell you about a number you might obtain from an experiment. His attitude was that the wavefunction represented our knowledge about the electron. But others began to interpret quantum theory as a genuine proposal that the electron really was in many places at once until measured by experiment.
This interpretation is supported by experiments with free particles, in which the wavefunction appears to be able to undergo interference - as if the wavefunction were a literal description of the electron.
Scientific Realism
Although Einstein was enamored with Mach as a young man, and helped introduce Mach’s ideas to quantum theoreticians, he was in the latter part of his life an outspoken defender of the scientific realist position. As he stated it in 1948:
“the concepts of physics refer to a real external world, i.e. ideas are posited of things that claim a real existence independent of the perceiving subject.”
Bohr perhaps best represents the opposite position:
There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature
Scientific realists have been under a lot of pressure in the last century. Quantum theory requires that either electrons are by nature mathematical and non-determinate, or our knowledge of them is limited in a fundamental way. The sheer volume of printed paper in which philosophers are tearing their hair out over this problem could (and does) fill libraries.
However, there is one additional, very important and often overlooked assumption. That is, the assumption that quantum theory is a successful theory.
To question this is heresy. After all, quantum theory gives us good predictions for the results of experiments with free particles that display interference patterns. There is scarcely a physicist alive who would openly, publicly question the value of quantum theory.
But quantum theory has never been good at calculating the interactions between two electrons. While it correctly predicts the light emitted from hydrogen (one electron orbiting one proton), it cannot do so for heavier atoms. Theoreticians wave this off and say that it is in principle possible to do so, but the calculations are too herculean. But our patience with this attitude should end.
Students new to quantum mechanics, who have problems interpreting the theory, are often told to “Shut up and calculate.” But we really need to tell the professors “calculate or shut up.” For a century, we have been gathering reams of reliable experimental data on the spectra of atoms and molecules that cannot be matched with quantum calculations.
In 2016 I published the first edition of my book about Randell Mills’s new theory of nature. Mills returns to the classical paradigm and models the electron as a spherical shell surrounding the nucleus. If Mills had proposed his theory by 1925 instead of 1991, quantum mechanics would never have been conceived, because Mills’s theory makes quick work of how electrons interact. His model allows us to solve complex atoms with simple force-balance equations. As a result, he has matched NIST data tables of ionization energies for atoms, as well as correctly predicting the spectrum of helium, and hundreds of other problems.
Mills resolves experiments with free particles in a way that doesn’t require any funny business about the wavefunction, and correctly predicts other experimental results with free particles, such as the behavior of electrons in liquid helium, that quantum theory gets dead wrong.
The vindication of a classical theory does make the job of a philosopher of science much easier, but it does not erase the century of debate over the nature of scientific truth.
Realism and Empiricism
To accept that our consciousness is in contact with a natural world means that we can come to understand the nature of that world with enough work. This includes coming to understand the nature of our sensations and perceptions, and how to fortify our experience against possible illusions, and how to utilize tools that enhance our perceptions into realms previously inaccessible, such as the very large (telescopes), the very small (microscopes), and so on.
Aside from the realists, there is a closely-related camp of “empiricists” who retain a dose of skepticism, and believe that theories may be true, but that we are unwilling or unable to say for sure. Empiricists don't commit themselves to truth or belief as strongly as the realist, but aren’t total skeptics either.
Bas van Fraassen, a philosopher with his own unique dialect of the empiricist tradition, claimed:
“Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate, and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate.”
This position seems rather safe. After all, if a theory works, then we are justified in saying so, justified in using it practically, and perhaps not justified in saying much more. Would this way of looking at science help us avoid the pitfall of psychological attachment to an outmoded theory? Should we be forever uncommitted and detached, the epistemological bachelor?
This position, to say it another way, is to suggest that we only have access to representations of the external world, and these representations may be fallible. Instead of accepting truth, we can only accept the notion that when utilizing these so-called truths (another word fails me), they will probably work. In a sense, this is almost semantic, replacing the “truth”-word with another unit of language that takes its place under almost all circumstances.
Where do they differ? Truth does have a way of gripping the mind in a way that empirical adequacy does not. Science is our struggle to comprehend the universe.
Van Fraassen advocated a unique position that was a hybrid between realism and skepticism, arguing that while we could make truth statements about objects perceivable with our senses, we should not do so concerning things difficult or impossible to directly observe. He called this position “constructive empiricism.”
This position is a complex hybrid. It affirms our sense perceptions when dealing with ordinary observations but denies they can be reliably extended. It affirms knowledge on the scale of everyday life but brings skepticism to anything not directly observed. It is not nuanced, but a broad stroke.
I feel it is simply a capitulation to quantum theory, going back to Mach and the founders, that we ought to reject theoretical notions that go beyond our sense experiences.
Van Fraassen argued for his empiricist position by posing two rhetorical questions:
First, how we are able to judge the truth of a theory beyond its empirical adequacy?
Second, is there any value in doing so? How much farther does it get us to know that a theory is true beyond being empirically adequate?
In my 2016 book I constructed a rebuttal argument.
Good theories come from seeking truth. They require us to commit to the meanings of physical concepts, take literally the words we use to describe them, and ensure that they can be plausibly real and visualizable in the mind’s eye.
Seeking truth forces us to create coherent, internally consistent theories that do not allow the kinds of multiple, conflicting explanations (“dualities” or even outright contradictions) we find in quantum theory. With a commitment to truth we seek to integrate adjacent areas of knowledge, to understand interrelated phenomena.
Seeking theories that tell us about nature, allow us to make predictions of new phenomena. Although all knowledge is subject to revision, successful theories are good evidence for truth. It would be a miracle for them to be as empirically adequate as they are, without being true.
My argument, concisely stated, was that seeking truth is useful. But this is true because in the process of intentionally seeking truth rather than something less, we fully embrace our interaction with the natural world instead of making choices that allow us to separate from it. When we convince ourselves that we are not resolving what is true, we fail to catch our own mistakes that are clear as day.
But this argument, like those of Descartes, assume the consequent. The only way I know that seeking truth makes more useful theories is by empirical observation and historical study, on the assumption that my cognition is derived from perceptual experience of the natural world. There is no way to support this position because there is neither a way to refute it. It is a necessary feature of consciousness that it is in contact with a natural world.
What is consciousness?
In a lecture at Princeton University by the head of the Rockefeller Institute, I first heard the idea of “information reaction.” The lecturer was speaking about the biological cell. A cell takes a complex series of chemical signals and this triggers a complex, intelligent reaction.
The cell is not a machine, it is a circuit board.
In a simple information reaction, features of reality are encoded as representations in matter. This could be either chemical signals or electrical signals in a nervous system. This encoded information is processed by the organism on an informational level to generate instructions for action.
Human cognition is unique among information reactions in nature, even among the most intelligent animals, because of our ability to utilize representations with high levels of abstract power, such that we are aware of ourselves and our environment. We monitor our attention to select among vast range of possible futures. This is our experience of consciousness.
Like all information reactions, we require stimuli to function; we cannot exist in a vacuum.
But our tools of thought, our abstract concepts, are more complex than chemical signals in a cell. Our concepts are derived from selective attention and understanding developed from a constant supply of stimuli throughout our entire life, building over time into enormous sophistication.
Even the slightest occurrence that seems out of place, such as a coffee cup hovering weirdly over the surface of your desk, would depart so significantly from a lifetime of attention that it would force you to look again, and see if it was merely an illusion, or the basis to revise a lifetime of perceptual experience.
I find the concept of an information reaction useful, because it reveals that we cannot simply manufacture our reality. Rather, we construct a model of the world from empirical experience.
The Semantic (Model-Based) View of Theories
So what is a scientific theory?
In the latter half of the century, a group of thinkers founded a view of scientific knowledge called the “semantic view.” They proposed the idea of a “model,” which consists of a set of “principles” that express important relationships between objects or properties that are part of the model. Important principles (like laws of nature) are artful and efficient propositions important to a model.
One problem with this view of scientific knowledge as conceived by prior philosophers is the assumption that scientific theories are somehow self-contained, with a finite set of principles. I disagree with this. Even the meanings of the words we use in constructing a scientific theory require an understanding of relationships that bleed over into general knowledge of the world.
A model is a cognitive object embedded within a web of knowledge. For a Newtonian theory of matter, some relationships are fixed and others are free to vary. Our theory (our model) of “mass” describes a class of things that contain mass but may be various sizes, shapes, or colors.
This is actually a good way to describe all conceptual knowledge. Theories begin as ordinary knowledge and become scientific through refinement, rigor, and precision.
The only thing that philosophers had to gain by segregating scientific knowledge from other kinds was to accommodate the weirdness of quantum mechanics. But science must begin with good common sense.
Is the world a simulation?
Even if we accept that science is about truth, how do we know that it isn’t all a lie?
Descartes was worried that perhaps an evil demon was creating an illusion of an external world; today we might worry that our experience is merely a simulation on an alien computer. Although I find such arguments silly, intelligent scientists like Stephen Hawking believed that this was likely.
But if this is true, then the natural world of which we are speaking is the simulation on the alien computer, and that simulation is the thing external to consciousness from which our cognition is derived. It doesn’t really change the scientific realist position, because truth in this context is awareness of the simulation as it presents to us.
The argument against the idea that the natural world is a simulation is simply Occam’s Razor - there is no evidence for it. There must exist a natural world within which the alien simulation is operating anyway, so it doesn’t liberate us from believing in an external world.
The matrix may have you, but for now anyway, ignorance is bliss.
Thoughts and questions? Join the conversation!
For further reading, this topic is covered in the chapter: The Nature of Theories in the forthcoming book: The End of Fire: how the hydrino is sparking a revolution in physics and clean energy by Brett Holverstott.
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