The goal of this essay is to probe how science could have been different—and how it still can be! —by looking at if and how a general science of human behavior could have, in fact, arose at different points in the past couple of centuries, and still can. I argue that the history of science shows plenty of examples of intellectual techniques and methods that were created for other purposes that could have been fruitfully deployed to develop facets of a separate and integrated human science even as certain basic philosophical precepts stood in the way. The essay examines these missed opportunities and critiques past and contemporary efforts to bridge natural, artificial, and human phenomena. While doing so, the essay points to ways in which physics itself would have been enriched had it taken human behavior as a “legitimate” object of study. I also sketch conceptual issues that must be addressed before a truly new science of humans can emerge.

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    Hi WhiteStarfish
    Following is a summary and review of your essay performed by AI Chat GPT 4. I've provided it for you to demonstrate the theme of my essay, that AI will play a role in the future of peer review. My essay is titled "Age of Knowledge"
    I hope you enjoy this review of your work.

    Chat GPT 4
    The essay argues that despite impressive advances in scientific and technological fields, humans struggle to understand their own place within the physical and epistemic structures of their design. The challenges of emerging cooperation amid widespread conflict, collectively accepted limits on resource consumption, and trade-offs between individual goals and social goods remain far from being met. The author suggests that a new science of humans, rigorously built from the intellectual tools that study of the physical world necessitated, is required to successfully navigate the next pandemic, stop the next global war, and align intelligence created by humans with their own values.

    The essay argues that considerable advances in biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and political science do not obviate the need for another human science, but instead a grand synthesis of insights from various disciplines is needed. The essay argues that the social sciences have been plagued by the problem of “micro-foundations,” where scientists who study human behavior are yet to come to such consensus, making it difficult to derive principles of contemporary macroeconomics (of aggregate output growth) from the study of microeconomics (individual utility-maximizing economic agents) outside highly-specific and much-contested models.

    The essay makes a compelling argument for the need for a new science of humans and acknowledges the shortcomings of the social sciences. The writing is clear and concise, making it easy to follow the author's argument. The essay's quality rating is high, and it provides a thought-provoking perspective on the challenges of understanding human behavior.

    The essay "What Should a Human Science Study?" discusses the challenges of defining the subject of human science and how it could be approached. The author argues that humans are different from other animals in their ability to marshal various attributes at once, such as exhibiting goal-directed behavior through language and gesture while also anticipating the future. The science of human behavior should take these abstract attributes as a starting point and attempt to deduce their interactions' consequences. The science should be grounded in natural laws and model the attributes in observable, measurable, and conceptually unambiguous terms.

    The essay also discusses missed opportunities to develop a comprehensive physics of human behavior and how such a science could have enriched physics. The author believes that teleological formulations of mechanics have remained underexplored as tools to understand human behavior. The essay ends by acknowledging the need to take context-specific stochastic components and path-dependence seriously in any science of human behavior.

    Overall, the essay provides a thought-provoking discussion on the challenges of defining and approaching the subject of human science. The author argues convincingly for taking a starting point from the abstract attributes of human behavior and grounding the science in natural laws.

    Chat GPT 4

    Abhijnan Rej
    An excellent essay aimed at overcoming the conceptual-paradigmatic crisis in the metaphysical / ontological basis of the "sciences of nature" and "sciences of the spirit", which manifests itself as a crisis of understanding and mutual understanding transforming into an extremely dangerous total existential crisis of Humanity.
    You write:
    <<Should we not—instead—work towards a grand synthesis of insights from these various disciplines to address our current predicaments as a species?>>

    Agree completely. First of all, it is necessary to more actively seek solutions to the "millennium problem" - the ontological justification of mathematics (ontological basification), and therefore knowledge in general.

    <<Science can be what it should be only by finding a way to square the two within a single conceptual frame.>>

    Agree. This means to build "a super-unified field theory that describes both physical and semantic manifestations of the World." (Mathematician and philosopher Vasily Nalimov "The Self-Aware Universe", 1996).
    I believe that such a "super-unified field theory" should be based on the general construction of the ontological basis of knowledge: ontological framework, carcass, foundation.
    Here it is necessary to recall important philosophical precepts
    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world."
    John A. Wheeler: “We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself."
    A.N. Whitehead: “A precise language must await a completed metaphysical knowledge.”

    The methodology of the dialectical-ontological construction of the ontological basis of knowledge is built on the ground of one MetaCategory - "Logos" and one Meta-Aximom: "In the Beginning was the Logos.../"Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος...", where "Logos" is the MetaLaw that governs the Cosmos (in the spirit of Heraclitus) , one SuperPrinciple, one Sign and one Symbol. The semantic core of the "Self-Aware Universe" model is the concept Ontological (structural, cosmic) memory, the "soul of matter", its measure.
    Good luck in the Competition!
    Regards.

      6 days later

      Metaphysics and all that has its place. The only fault I have with the essay is that there are practical steps which can be taken which do not go into the realm of philosophy. In my view as being a doctoral person for over two decades what astounds me is a total disinclination in terms of foundations of the veracity of the the models used. I.e. and this is due to binging out on computer simulations to find matches between purported predicted data sets, and actually observed data sets. What human being can do which is still out of the range of AI is to synthesize completely new hypothesis which are a break from mere data matching from theory to experiment.

      What can be done is to celebrate this very human ability and to encourage its deployment. This is not to trash talk computers, Post Newtonian approximations and the plethora of results from Perturbation theory and approximate non linear analysis of non linear systems. It is instead a call for individuals to respect this very real human ability for innovation beyond the means of AI and to nuture it. Nuturing it will give back a lot of basic humanity to the scientific pursuits of today

      5 days later

      Hi,
      Good essay, very valid approach and well written, though I did feel in the end it delivered a little less than it's potential. i.e. little identification or analysis of the very many 'empirically suspect assumptions' you refer to, which poor human behaviour has prevented us challenging. None the less good points well made. You may enjoy mine, which goes a bit further in terms of alternative more consistent assumptions, though with the apparent help of a more intelligent being being interviewed! I think they entirely agree your main points along the way. Good score coming for those. Well done

      11 days later

      A scientific enterprise built on humanism sounds very enticing to one gets to the real issue. I.e. the layout of experiments needed to judge the truth or falsity of hypothesis is not a MORAL issue.

      Secondly, one can and should condemn "scientiific experimentation on human beings " The horrors of unit 731 in China during world war II are ample warnings to that effect, but the Japanese psychopaths who tortured people for the hell of it, were not scientists but state power enabled criminals

      One should avoid having "science" used to amplify state violence against the helpless . That is a whopping MORAL issue, but the matter of values of defacto research are neither linked toward humanism, nor can they be, honestly speaking

      WhiteStarfish
      I find your essay thought provoking, although I agrre with one response that it ends with a less that impressive ending.
      Some aspects to consider: You point out the importance of goal-directed behavior, which means goal-directed for a human. If the reductionist philosophy, so prevalent in physics today, is to be believed, then goal-directed behavior must somehow start at the particle level. How we could manage to impart human goal-directed behavior to particles seems either very far off in the future, or an incorrect assumption for the study of humans. So I will suggest that the study of human behavior, individually and socially, cannot sit on a reductionist perspective.
      If we consider alternative perspectives that might indicate cause can come from a larger scale source and impinge on the smaller (e.g., goal-directed behavior that developed the LHC) - then we have a better position from which to start. There are some, especially biologists, that entertain such a perspective that larger can impact smaller.
      However, this presents an issue with the mathematical tools we use, since statistics (and probability) operate from the smaller to the larger (statistical analysis 'averages out' individual actions on one level in order to identify concepts or patterns at a higher level). If the mathematical tools we use only work from the smaller to the larger, we will not be able to describe actions from the larger to the smaller using such tools. The heavy use of such tools (smaller to larger only) would re-enforce the reductionist perspective - since the tools do not allow for another interpretation.
      Another consideration: If we are to consider modelling the world we perceive, with humans as well as particles, then we should be able to model a glass blower intentionally creating a vase at the glass blower level, at the smooth hot glass surface level, at the very active molecular level of glass, at the atomic level and the particle level - with all level activities occurring simultaneously. Even if we attempt to explain intention as having it's origin with particles in the brain, the overall human still acts upon the glass and heat from the higher level impacting the lower levels. If we continue to believe in a pure reductionist perspective using only upward directed tools, we are unlikely to get very far with economics, social, or individual behavior as science. A more expansive perspective is needed using different tools.

      Beautifully written essay, which starts off well, until one gets to page 5. Not only do I object to the abhorrent and misguided anthropocentrism displayed, I also object to the pseudoscience of Paul Davies’ (and others’) “downward causation”, because it is nothing but the usual block-universe type of system, where one tries to isolate and follow a small part of the system’s effect on the rest of the system. It is all downhill after that, going into complete drivel about human communication being analogous to optical, electrical, and radio signals, and how “modern science” could have known this earlier: “the irony is that it was not for the lack of empirical material about how meaning was encoded into, and decoded from, optical, electrical, and radio signals” (page 7).

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