The best-laid schemes of mice and men // Go oft awry, // And leave us nothing but grief and pain, // For promised joy! – Robert Burns (1785) The purpose of human existence can range from fulfilling God's commandments in Abrahamic religions to living an absurd life in a meaningless world with nothing to discover. The role of science is thus deeply entangled with the role we attribute to ourselves. While both extremes do not encourage any exploration of Nature, we have pragmatically developed best-laid schemes to analyse and investigate natural processes in order to explain and predict their behaviour and use it to our advantage. In this essay, I will show that these best-laid schemes often amount to creating a detailed image based on our expectations. Then trying to find counterexamples or supportive evidence for such sophisticated models is considered knowledge gain. Yet, too frequently, Nature ploughs up our promising guesses and lets many an idea go awry. Instead of paving our path to understanding with trial-and-error failures and disappointments, I propose to walk a more motivating and constructive way. This ``science of senses” builds upon an explicit separation between observational sensing and increasingly detailed assumptions to make sense of acquired data. In this approach, a hierarchy of models is set up such that existing data provide the evidence on which the fundamental models are completely based. Beyond this secured knowledge, higher-level speculative models fill the gaps in the uncharted territory not yet explored with data points. The random walk to favour or refute specific complex models is thus replaced by the pleasure of efficiently and incrementally finding more things out. Failure to predict or explain new data can only happen at the highest modelling levels and building upon data-based knowledge, remaining open questions are also clearly set out.
Of Senses and Sciences
Beautiful essay! The story of Burns and the mouse, and how the tragedy could have been averted, is brilliantly told!
Thank you very much! Hope it's also inspiring for how we continue to explore Nature!
If one consider that Religion is in a such manner to continue science than the " science of senses" will have always meanings in "observational sensing and increasingly detailed assumptions to make sense of acquired data" and meanings in personnal experience as mystic living.
Observational sensing is measured by the commun units as the kilogramme, the meter and the second. Mystic experience and Religion culture are measured by low crimes in society, working togother for the better of all...etc.
We should stop to consider that science is in the opposite side of the Religion.
Alaya Kouki Agreed. I think science and religion answer different questions in life and use different methods to get there. A middle point between the two is philosophy in some sense. Particularly in cosmology as the endeavour to understand the universe as a whole. Science can take data only starting at a certain point, but we will always have to base our interpretations on some philosophical framework and basic assumptions that will forever lie beyond any testable theory (what Jim Peebles once described as being beyond empirical reasoning). If we go one step further, we can even ask whether the universe has a purpose and therefore, a designer, if we connect religion to a deity. Yet, neither the philosophical assumptions nor the religious deeper level can be covered by the science of senses.
I had read many beutiful articles in this Competition and this one is included in them. I hope that FQXI choose a writer and make a book with the most beautiful and consistant articles. Really I won't loose those articles.
Congrats for your essay and the analysis of how we approach and consider the datas, the determinsitic known sciences and the possible extrapolations and assumptions in function of our philosophies. I liked your essay , we need to have this creativity and imagination in trying to respect a determinisn . The actual problem is our limitations , we have difficulties to reach some scales and to measure and observe deeper parameters , so this creativity is important and the generality of models to try to have hierachies converging , regards
Steve Dufourny thank you very much for your kind words and your positive feedback! I agree that we have to take our own limits more into account, this is something often neglected in theoretical models, in my opinion. The idea did not come out of thin air but is actually a process that I actively practice in my own work with very positive results.
Sometimes, I have the impression that our abductive way of reasoning is a bit of a self-deceit, pretending we could reach any level of understanding within our life time if we just get some "lucky inspirational ideas". But more scientific humility and putting things into hierarchical relations may actually bring is further -- at least it was key for my own success...
Best wishes,
Beige Bandicoot.
Alaya Kouki Thank you very much!! I am happy to publish my essay after the competition is over anywhere where it is welcome.
Do you know of Edward Moore's “Gedanken-experiments on sequential
machines” paper from 1956? It states that every finite deterministic machine that is considered a kind of black box (like our universe?), the latter being probed only by input- output experiments to figure out its inner mechanics, is equivalent to an arbitary number of other machines that have the same input-output behaviour.
So definitely determining what goes on under the surface of an assumed-to-be deterministic world is an impossible task from a strictly logical point of view, regardless of how many people figure out some of such a machines' possible inner mechanics (because there are many possiblities that can be determined, but no such possibility can be found to be the one-and-only necessary one for such a black box).
What you describe in your well-written essay as the hierarchical approach seems to me to be an instant of approximating a solution to a so called “SAT”-problem. The latter is an NP-Complete problem and may not be solvable in general by any deterministically working algorithm.
Nonetheless, good essay with some interesting twists and turns. Especially your elaboration on addictive behaviour, which in my opinion has some really good explanatory power.
Jenny Wagner you are welcome, wish you all the best in your researchs. I agree totally about this humility , after all we have deep unknowns and deep limitations philosophical, physical, ontological, mathematical. I believe strongly also that a kind of complementarity could be weel instead of our competitive global system and tooi much isolated thinkers , it is probably due also to our normality accepted in this econnomical system, more this vanity and the bad habits, but the hope exists lol, regards
Stefan Weckbach Thank you very much for this great inspiration with your comments!
I haven't been aware of Moore's paper but find it very helpful. It interestingly alludes to the ergodicity theorem, which is often required for some robust knowledge gain, but not fulfilled for all processes in nature, e.g. gravity, the most relevant on largest scales, is unfortunately one of them.
Indeed my hierarchical knowledge gain idea has to be elaborated in more details in its algorithmic process and it cannot be more than just an approximation as it still contains abductive reasoning steps and our limited resources to gain knowledge as human beings. In my view, becoming aware of the (current) limits of our knowledge gain is also an important insight to gain (e.g. as long as there is no evidence for faster-than-light signal propagation, this is a horizon we cannot cross but should take into account when doing research on information transfer or interstellar travel). There are not too many theories actually taking into account the technological limits when setting up new ideas.
While it's true that we cannot guarantee to find a good solution for an NP-complete problem, I personally still prefer a more systematic approach to tackle the problem because, based on a random walk of abductions, we may get lucky but, what is your impression, how likely is that and what results can we use from the path towards success if we fail along the way or don't get further funding to pursue it? How many people unaware of already pursued and failed attempts repeat them just to fail again?
But...my guess why hierarchical knowledge gain is not so popular despite its advantages is that it takes the fun and the addictive power to continue out of the process and this is also a major driving point for science: Curiosity and the pleasure of finding things out.
Best regards,
Beige Bandicoot.
Hi BeigeBandicoot,
thanks for your reply. I think we are pretty much in consent. My comment was merely to highlight that the long awaited “theory of everything” might be out of human reach due to human limitations of understanding and mathematical issues of provability. In my own essay and my remarks on other essays I argue against such a “theory of everything”, but that does not mean that I know for sure that such a theory is out of reach. So, as long as your hierarchical approach is aware of both possibilities, I think it will work (since otherwise beliefs will creep into the hierarchical mechanics and present themselves as secured knowledge – what would bias the whole enterprise).
“How many people unaware of already pursued and failed attempts repeat them just to fail again?”
Very good point of which I think that it should be considered with more rigour in the scientific community. You are one of the people that work on that (or the only one, I don't know) and I think this work is of huge logical importance for making progress.
The addiction-problem is another hugely important aspect in my opinion. Maybe people with a lesser potential to such addictions could work on your hierarchical approach, while people with more potential to these addictions could remain working on their pet models. This would be a double-tracked procedure for eventually coming closer to truth. The third group, people that weren't aware of already failed attempts, may then also join one of the already mentioned paths – if they are convinced that they reached a death-end.
Stefan Weckbach Hi AquamarineTapir,
yes, it very much looks like we agree and yes, in my hierarchical approach I would love to include our limitations explicitly. Otherwise there is no way to know where the uncharted territory of knowledge lies. Guess that is another good point that should become more explicit: if we cannot clearly point to the regions in the landscape of knowledge that we cannot explore (yet) or haven't explored yet, we may as well go on an abductive path just to end up with an insight that we already knew before!
I am waiting for summer to see the clear names, as I guess we could already know each other if you write that you know an entire community tackling the limitations of our knowledge process. Happy to connect as this cannot be over-emphasised.
And agreed, people should be able to choose the path they want to go and we can have a hybrid knowledge gain process based on maximising their interests. (From a psychological point of view, I think that maximising people's will to work on these challenges could also maximise our insights!) That is what is currently done to some extent, e.g. by giving money to a lot of individual small-scale projects to look for any groundbreaking discovery but also to make long-term investments into larger systematic projects, e.g. in flagship projects like the "Blue Brain project". I just wish people on the smaller-scale projects could get more sustainable funding as you cannot expect groundbreaking work on a short-term basis...
Hi BeigeBandicoot,
this sounds good! I will also wait until the real names are revealed. Maybe there will be some surprises, at least this is an exciting contest format :-)
Stefan Weckbach Hopefully, this blind-date of opinions also brings some people together who would not have discussed with one another had they known the other person's name. 
Hi, BeigeBandicoot. I agree that
Jenny Wagner The role of science is thus deeply entangled with the role we attribute to ourselves.
Science is a human endeavor and its development is attached to ours. In my essay I comment on the importance of considering human development and interaction in order to make science different, and better. I invite you to take a look: "More diversity and creativity for a different science".
https://qspace.fqxi.org/competitions/entry/2330#control_panel
NADJA MAGALHAES
Thanks a lot, Celadon Dormouse, will take a look!!
Yes, I agree. I think the reason is not because there is no rational basis in one or the other part of the communication participants, but there are combinations of people whose communication habits simply do not fit together and this then produces major misunderstandings and leads to death ends. I guess there are many things implicit in our lines of reasoning that we should try to make explicit when communicating about scienctific “facts and fictions” for the goal of clarifying how we came to our statements.
In my own essay I tried to push the reader to the fact that we often confuse beliefs with knowledge. An interesting question would be whether or not this also works the other way round cognitively: confusing knowledge with belief, means doubting things that are considered secured scientific knowledge. This surely would necessitate to make auxiliary, yet unproven assumptions about reality, what is not per se forbidden by the scientfic method. I write this because I read your very interesting comment on the essay site “the geometry of counterfactual science” and as you wrote, the question is indeed how far one should go with such auxiliary assumptions, especially when they are not provable experimentally in principle. Or stated differently: where should we establish the line between facts and fiction?
By thinking a little bit about that question, it seems to me that at least a – yet to be discovered? - fundamental theory of “all there is” is doomed being unable to logically derive its fundamental base assumptions unambigously. Here your essay's approach gets most interesting for me, since for that case (maybe in the future, who knows) we are then faced again with the epistemological question about whether or not these fundamental assumptions are merely auxiliary assumptions – because by their very nature they will not be provable or disprovable by any means!
Now let's suppose we cannot find such a theory of everything (due to arbitrary reasons). Then the question still remains, and more pressing, where we should draw the line between facts and fiction. Moreover, one instant of that question is surely whether or not such a theory of everything is at all implicit and hence allowed by what we call reality. The only answer I have found to that conundrum is to always differentiate between temporary, secured knowledge and mere beliefs. I cannot imagine how it could be other than that for human beings trapped in a world that only allows the frog's eye perspective. I think a way out of that problem could indeed be to rediscover the “God of the gaps” as it occasionally was termed by some people. Without applying a certain religion to that assumption, I would call for re-examining this old-fashioned idea again on the basis of the human conditions and its lack for a true bird's eye perspective. And especially on the basis of the above mentioned epistemological gaps, gaps that obviously are an inherent part of the reality we live in.
Now comes my main point: in my opinion, I we want to make progress on all these issues, we at first must intuitively find a consistent scheme about whether or not reality allows for a transcendent realm of existence. A realm where those gaps do not exist. This is surely a religious, philosophical, or better termed, a metaphysical task, but I think not doomed right from the start. I think it critically hinges only on whether or not one is willing to accept that logics can transcend itself such that it logically infers that reality cannot have been emerged out of some illogical assumptions, like for example “absolute nothing”, “chaos”, “randomness”, “miracles”. The latter, namely “miracles” is what some people think is what led to reality. Either it existed forever, or it emerged from some reduced “reality”. It is clear that there are no other, more “rational” options if one wants to explain “it all”. But there seems to me to be one exception: for explaining all these miracles we can also assume an intentional creator who is superior to causality and to any logical systems (at least to all humanly knowable systems). That's what my essay is about. I would like and be happy if you could comment on what I wrote there – since I am interested in your feedback!
Hi BeigeBandicoot,
I highly appreciate your work, which is very close and understandable to me:
“Yet, too frequently, Nature ploughs up our promising guesses and lets many an idea go awry”.
My essay is devoted to the key facts that lead to new key laws that are not noticed by the generally accepted concept. But these laws may form a new science of studying reality without studying abstractions. I think you will also be interested in the elements of the deterministic functioning of the quantum solar system on the new laws that are given in the appendix, and which are similar to the quantum laws of the functioning of the Hydrogen atom.
I wish you success!