Metaversal Mining

I like Brian Cox’s programs. He has an engaging style and an obvious passion for cosmology but he was inconsistent with his own arguments within his own recent Huw Weldon lecture and did nothing to enhance is reputation as a commentator outside his own area of expertise.

As someone who is investigating aspects of the philosophy of science his blanket dismissal of the academic understanding of scientific understanding was disappointing. Yes, the Sokolian viewpoint that the scientific worldview has proven to be a superior worldview over others in explaining our physical universe is undoubtedly true, but to then go on to say that it should never be challenged is not a valid position for an academic to take. It doesn’t matter if post-modern interpretations of science have any real-world meaning or not because science and the scientific method themselves are human inventions.

If we take the ultimate argument of Godel’s incompleteness theorem as applied by po-mo researchers – that full knowledge about the pursuit of an area of understanding can never be attained from within that area of understanding. There is no part of Godel’s theorem that allows or even suggests that it can be applied outside an oblique area of mathematical proof, but it rings true in human experience. The people we know with the deepest subject knowledge are also the blindest to the consequences of that knowledge. The deep passion that Prof Cox has for starlight is not the same deep passion for starlight that the lover has for the light that cast across the face of the loved. There is no better or worse, but there is different. In dismissing different ways of understanding we reduce the imagined to the possible and the possible to the probable and so down to the actual.

Now the actual may in fact be perfectly wonderful in its own right, and I might suggest that in choosing cosmology and sub-atomic physics as his subject area Prof Cox has chosen well, but what about more mundane pursuits. The fluid dynamics of sewerage systems for example (sorry Spenser) will never attract ex-pop stars and yet is one of the basics of modern urban existence. It could be every bit as complex to comprehend with chaotic flows of different fluids interacting on both a physical and a chemical basis to bring good or harm to millions of people every day. But you would have to be heartless in the extreme not to allow the workers in that sector to imagine the smell away or that chunkiness in one stream is just chunkiness. And yet that is what Prof Cox is asking for when he wishes to dismiss a super-position of alternate understanding on science and scientific progress.

The thing is though, later in his lecture he performs a complete about-face with no apparent recognition that he is contradicting himself. He yearns for the leaps in imagination and the deeper levels of understanding that he, as a professional scientist, feels through his hard fought understanding of science without recognising that what he is eulogising is a philosophy of science, and without acknowledging that the recognition of the polemic as a valid form implies admission that debate is possible. To be fair he did recognise the difficulty of his own position with regard to absolutism and autocrasy, but that only made things worse and made his own status as ‘talking head’ less tennable.

I agreed with 95% of what he said in the body of the lecture, especially regarding shifting objectivity to consensus and the journalistic tendancy to see reporting the controversy as balance, but his bookends showed that his own understanding of what philosophy of science is and does is every bit as skewed as poor reporting of MMR or climate change.

No-one is an authority on anyone else’s views but their own and no-one should be forced into a certain viewpoint irrespective of factual correctness. Evidence is just evidence. Interpretation is carried out by humans with human flaws. If you take your own argument a step or two further Prof Cox you will see the tyranny of your logic and recognise that we must be allowed to make mistakes irrespective of the quality of communication available.