Scientism, Aircraftism, Philosophism… But Human Knowledge Is One

Scientism considers that science is the only reliable source of knowledge about the world, including questions traditionally addressed by philosophy, ethics, and religion. This does not resist examination, because, first of all, one has to define “science”. Is love a science? Try a world without love: it won’t happen. More prosaically, there are many degrees of certainty in science, from clumsy guesswork to 100%, aircraft engineering degree of certainty. 

For example the Big Bang theory is full of hypotheses rolled out to make the theory work. The general idea of the Big Bang came first in various publications, for example the Jewish Bible, and then the “science” was adjusted accordingly… for want of a better alternative! 

Newton’s gravitation theory was itself full of hypotheses, and for at least one of them, that gravity was instantaneous, Newton in private correspondence confided that it was “so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”. One can see that Newton had a robust understanding of the limits of science…. Even his own science!

There is such a thing as aircraft science, it better be certain, it’s very close to 100% certain.  Aircraftism, would be trying to extract all and any wisdom from the enormously certain knowledge found in an aircraft… it would be ridiculously limited. “Scientism” is an exalted version of aircraftism, it’s ridiculously limited.

Hawking declared philosophy to be dead. Philosophy is dead,’ Stephen Hawking once declared, because it ‘has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.’

One has to be careful here. One could invert matters a bit by declaring science to be dead because it has not kept up with all the modern developments in human sciences, particularly philosophy. Quantum Field Theory could easily be exhibited as a social cult full of exaggerated claims from hallucinating gurus (Theory Of Everything anybody?), assisted by gross schizophrenia: the most exact theory ever, QFT, is also the most false, ever, as QFT is off by a factor of 10^120…

Hawking’s greatest claim to justified glory is Hawking radiation, the prediction of Black Hole emission of radiation from the event horizon itself. That’s beautifully simple… as long as one believes in the theoretical machinery to create particles out of nothing in QFT (the latter as experimental support, as it makes predictions found to be true!) 

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A once naive Feynman also fired broadsides at philosophy… so his son became a philosopher, bringing Feynman to admit that he was also a philosopher (for example when he and his accomplice Wheeler concocted the extremely philosophically dubious idea that there was just one electron in the universe going back and forth in time… perhaps the weirdest idea, ever). Feynman realized the analogy between the Principle Of Least Action, and a divine revelation. Except that POLA is demonstrated in countless experiments and theories…

In a variant of “scientism”, so-called “weak scientism”, science is held to be the best source of knowledge… But science will never tell us if it is right, correct and appropriate to love poetry or a mysterious neighbor…

Hawking claimed that scientists, not philosophers, are now ‘the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge’. The response from some philosophers was to accuse Hawking of ‘scientism’… However the simple truth is that Hawking may have confessed stealthily a surprising truth: Hawking, as many modern physicists, was guilty of philosophism… explaining much of putative possible science with barely hidden philosophy. Much of Black Hole science is philosophy in disguise (I explained this to Hawking and other luminaries in a seminar at Stanford, decades ago by pointing out logical steps in BH theory where Quantum Mechanics was ignored!). 

Indeed, much of Hawking’s own “science” is barely disguised philosophy of sorts. Hawking’s “Science” contains philosophically dubious notions such as Black Hole entropy (originally an idea of Bekenstein)… from an analogy, between how the area of a Black Hole would behave and the fact that, the bigger an area, the more states thus the more entropy. The Black Hole information paradox uses a philosophy of Quantum Mechanics… which one may well disagree with. The very field of science in which Hawking made his name, is all too… philosophical. Much of modern physics has this problem, with time going in the wrong direction, “retrocausality” and other absurdities…

Whereas, say, protein folding is straight science, producing certain knowledge, it has nothing to say to the rest of the world.

Philosophical objections to some science, or scientific objections to some philosophy are both irreplaceable. Advancing science without philosophy is just as impossible as advancing philosophy without science. They are two extremities of the same spectrum of advancing understanding. Human knowledge is not just many, it’s also one.

Patrice Ayme

Rafale fighter-bomber: a work of art and science, operating with absolute certainty, but is it all what wisdom has to offer? (The active stealth of the Rafale shrouds all the weapons in an electronic cloak… )

KNOW, THUS SURVIVE

(Old Hominid adage…)

HUMANITY IS SCIENCE, SCIENCE IS HUMANITY, DARK AND LIGHT.

Primitives, oligarchs and their obsequious servants, regressives and obscurantists insist that science is something special, reserved to slightly deranged specialists, smelling of sulfur and devoid of feeling. Actually, that’s completely false, and an attempt by oligarchs to persuade their subjects that they can’t think. Humanity is science and science is humanity. It is important to understand this, because, if one doesn’t, not only progress is impossible, but what it means to be human, misundertood. One then goes around like the Absurdists, making a religion of Stalin, or Sysiphus, ready to become subjects of tyrants.

“Science” comes from scire, to know [1]. By this, all is said about why brains were evolved. Without knowledge, advanced animals are nothing, they die. That includes migratory birds. Migratory birds, from Europe to Africa, suffer as much as 70% mortality on their first attempted migration. What are they doing on their first migration? Following those they know who know. On the return trip, only 50% mortality: the birds are learning. 

Intelligence means adaptability. Many storks (cigognes) figure out that, considering climate warming, they will survive the winter better than the dangerous migration meant to avoid said winter. Thus some decide not to migrate, and, instead reside in Europe year round. This is a new phenomenon. This stork climate science is not fundamentally different from Kepler’s curve fitting in the discovery of his three laws that planet follow (equal areas, ellipses, relation between period and radius). Observe nature, model nature, draw conclusion (s).

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HUMANITY IS THE KNOWLEDGE SPECIES:

The two species of chimpanzees and gorillas and the three species of orangutans are full of knowledge on their environment, including medicinal plants, and potential predators whom they are keen to confront, be they lions or tigers. However their mental capability does not exceed that of a five year old human, so there is only that much they can discover, and transmit through culture.

The earliest fossils argued by their discoverers to belong to the human lineage are Sahelanthropus tchadensis (7 Ma) and Orrorin tugenensis (6 Ma), followed by Ardipithecus (5.5–4.4 Ma), with species Ar. kadabba and Ar. ramidus. The human peripatetic (walking on two legs, running), semi-predatory way of life was launched in those early times, making our ancestors into killer apes.

Humans learned sophisticated meat procurement strategies around three million years ago. We know this from the latest excavations revealing stone tools and weapons. Hunting enabled humans to grow more power hungry brains, in a virtuous circle of meat fueled culture feeding evolution and reciprocally. Then fire was conquered. Making fire in a wet wintry forest is more than an art: it had to be a science to insure survival. The temperate zone, with its rigorous winters, could be colonized only from mastering fire and the making of clothing. This happened two million years ago, with Homo Ergaster.

There is evidence of trade on huge distances, even 50,000 years ago, say in Australia. Thus humanity developed the knowledge, long ago, that trade enabled advanced technology.

The knowledge species became the planetary species. For example, all over the Pacific Ocean, which covers nearly half the globe, trade routes developed. The South American sweet potato ended in the Highlands of New Guinea… That was very mysterious until Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany and geography. Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, sailed 8,000 km across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. In truth, Polynesians had much more sophisticated ships. Seventy years later, Polynesian genes have been discovered in South America, demonstrating the existence of trade across the Pacific long before Magellan showed.

To sail the ocean required advanced astronomy. Some will scoff: we are much more advanced now, and they will chuckle. Oh yeah? Then explain why modern science can’t explain what most of the mass of the universe, Dark matter and Dark Energy possibly could be (excluding yours truly’s explanation: SQPR)… 

Humanity spread in areas without wood or fossil fuels, where, without technology, it could not have survived for more than a few hours: polar and desert areas, high seas, and high mountains ranges and plateaus. 

When we colonize the Solar System, it will be more of the same.

The most dangerous animal, we the cuddlies. For thousands of generations before the Neolithic and the emergence of civilizations, human females were as dangerous as human males, because females had access to extremely lethal poisoned weapons used to kill megafauna (which they probably made themselves). We have direct evidence of this in 20C hunting and gathering populations.

The modern submissive human female is a consequence of the rise of specialized civilization with warrior castes, and breeding armies of enslaved females. Female submission is a completely artificial artefact of a stage in civilization. Czarina Catherine the Great conquered Southern Ukraine, ethnic cleasing it, and calling it “Little Russia”… She was not even Russian… And Voltaire admired her…

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Ian Miller replied: “The interesting question is what was the evolutionary force that led to humans to acquire enhanced brains? The usual proposition is that the ancestors of chimpanzees were happy where they were. Our ancestors tried new territory, and the prompt weeding out of those who were unsuitable led to more rapid evolutionary advancement.”

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Happy where they were, and perhaps too happy… If you feel right always, you are not trying hard enough: this is our distant ancestors thought, as they headed away from the trees. Occupying a new ecological niche always favorizes new speciation. So a species niche making at will, will self-evolve, and exponentiate, this is indeed what happened: Will to power through the power of new niches. Amor Nidificans, not Amor Fati.  

The old proposition of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was that life tends to increase complexity. Lamarck observed that through his microscope, studying mollusks’ fossil evolution. Such a force is the opposite of entropy. To understand it we will have to get a better understanding of Quantum Mechanics and entanglement. As the complexifying force exerts itself upon the environment, new ecological niches are created, and then, occupied by life itself. 

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Chimps love meat: it is more calorie laden than all other foods. Chimpanzees are also hyper aggressive. Chimpanzees also tend to spill out of the forest. I saw one large male chimp in savannah park, maybe 100 kilometers from the first serious forest, in an area full of lions and leopards. He demonstrated to me his unbelievable insanity, humongous strength, and delirious ferocity, half demolishing a solitary tree he had climbed on, in the process.  

Our ancestors were even more chimp-like than chimp themselves, on the Dark Side, and lived in the savannah more than other chimps. They could do so only if they were smarter and more violent. But then they prevented less smart and less violent chimps from joining. 

I suspect our ancestors used stones and branches as weapons early on, more than other primates: otherwise they would have been powerless and defenseless… And used them to the point that this usage drove human evolution. They had to keep at bay not only other chimps, but baboons and giant baboons (a species they dispatched early on). Baboons are hyper aggressive, to a ridiculous extent, but they fear chimps (who eat their young). Thus the human ancestors created a niche for themselves: hominoids are better at stone throwing than other primates because of the fact they can hang from their arms. Long arms swinging down give more momentum to stones (some baboons in Africa could testify to that fact when interacting with the ten year old version of yours truly). 

To survive in this more difficult niche, human created, our ancestors had to be smarter. The less bright ones got eaten. 

In any case, this is a story of extreme violence: failures don’t get to eat, let alone reproduce, and, instead, get eaten. 

I observed in the wild that psychology is very important. All brainy animals tend to do mental analysis, and they take the circumstances into context. I do not kill venomous snakes who do not engage in aggressive behavior. In general smart animals do not engage in aggressive behavior if the profit/risk ratio is not high enough. That’s what brains are for. But that profit/risk ratio is itself the fruit of a psychological evaluation, both from predator and prey. That’s why it’s in general a bad idea to run away from a predator. 

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Humans Are The Most Violent Species:

Violence is fundamentally the application of force on the environment: what could be more human? What species has modified Earth more than humans? Blue green algae creating Earth’s oxygen? Vegans planting genetically engineered soy, drenched by toxic fertilizers, to the horizon, where there used to be forests, will deny this, and flaunt their sheepiness, forgetting in their self-celebration, that the goat is a satanic symbol. If beavers kill forests to shelter their dwellings with dams, that’s indeed a form of violence. 

Thus extreme violence, be it only on the environment, be it only by colonizing it, establishing new ecological niches, extreme smarts and refined psychological analysis pervading nature, human, animal or physical, were the engines driving humanity forward for millions of years. Spending a few hours in a totally wild place full of megafauna, and without weapons, reveals this in a hurry: only the threat of potential hyperviolence keeps predators at bay… As long as one knows them well.

Once, hiking up a mountain with my family, I have exchanged verbal threats with a converging brown bear (Eurasian grizzly) for more than half an hour in an Iranian forest… The most terrible scream I did ever manage finally got him to go away (nothing else worked). Once in Yosemite, a large and fast stone impacting on a charging ursine target did it. And I had to demonstrate stone power to threatening bears several times. Bears know stones perfectly well, and fear them; once they know that you are a stone master, with resounding impacts on a third object to reveal that notion to their thick skulls, they retreat. Indeed, making a demonstration of stone throwing generally gets bears to gallop away. Unassisted cross country mountain running with minimal equipment in forest full of inquiring bears was my passion for decades, and it reveals nature’s psychology: a sort of pantheism is eminently practical. Survival tricks are a must. They can be as simple as not wearing headphones, or never stepping not far from something that could hide a lethal snake waiting in ambush.

It goes without saying that being ruled by smarts and ready to engage in preventive violence are not exactly “woke” notions. Integrating that fundamental truth, that smarts and violence dominate, or denying that it exists, is exactly why China went down for centuries, when it was overrun by foreigners, or why Europe has been going down for more than a century, or why China is coming back up, and why the US exists, and why the US is on its way up, more than ever (Biden plays woke, but only on TV; otherwise Biden is Trump 2.0).

We are the knowledge species, and more knowledge is how, on the average, our ancestors learned to survive better. 

Now is not any different. It is actually much more so: the survival of the species was never in doubt, until today and only new and better knowledge will save it.

Ah, and what of Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am!”. Well, “I am” was never in doubt. Anybody who thinks a bit knows that “being”, perception, precedes thinking. And there are plenty of situations when one feels that one is, and one does not, or can’t, think. So, whatever Descartes tried to say, it’s neither here nor there.

We are the knowledge species, we are potentially all scientists, critiques and thinkers. Except that oligarchs and plutocrats want us to believe most of us are no better, and at our best, as sheep… We will be, as a species, only if we think enough to know what is right, and important.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Old French science “knowledge, learning, application; corpus of human knowledge” (12 C.), from Latin scientia “knowledge, a knowing; expertness,” from sciens (genitive scientis) “intelligent, skilled,” present participle of scire “to know.”

Science The Only Way Out Of Fossil Fuels

Abstract: Some fashionable academics advocate violence to get rid of fossil fuels. That’s a category error: fossil fuels are not used from lack of violence, but from lack of alternatives which ecologists have been willing to use. Those alternatives have not been used, in great part because most persons presenting themselves as ecologists are against nuclear, and never heard of hydrogen. Also they are naïve about getting huge quantities of ore out of atrocious regimes, providing batteries, or what’s needed to make them thanks to dictators and human traffickers enslaving children, or abusing millions. Other technologies, such as carbon capture (although used successfully in precise places for special geological reasons) simply cannot be deployed now as a mass solution (although the Chinese energy plan pretends they carbon capture will be deployed on 980 gigawatts… that’s a lie, we don’t have the tech; Chinese planners say this, to keep building one new coal plant a week…). The wind power and battery route seems unsustainable as a world solution from needing too much special toxic elements.

The only sustainable solution is better minds and better science, thus a better educational system producing better youth. Out of it will arise better energy systems and then fossil fuels, which have been used for 80,000 years, will be dropped. violence is not the solution out of our ecological crises, only future science is. 

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The science on climate change due to CO2 increase has been clear for four decades. Yet despite decades of expensive world conferences, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and homilies to world peace, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising greenhouse gases emission levels, rising temperatures, dying seas and acidifying oceans. With the stakes so high, why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest? Could it be that… There is no other solution than keep on keeping on, and that, after all, the stakes are not that high?

The answers are not those US, Canadian, Australian and many other ecologists want to hear. France uses just a quarter of the CO2 emissions as Australia, per person. However, France uses nuclear and carbon pricing massively. Small cars too. And living in some of the densest cities on Earth (Paris in particular is that way). Plus sky high taxes and government spending relative to GDO, highest in the world. This powerful brew has been concocted while French know-how went down… Brute force has its down sides…  

A very close friend of mine, head of drilling at an oil giant (!), conducted, thanks to his technical knowledge, very efficient eco-sabotage against heavy equipment of a massive construction company in the Calanques (it was around 40 years ago!) The authorities never found who did it. This violent action gained time, enforced protection, and enabled the ultimate creation of the Calanques National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site (aside from stunning scenery, it has world famous undersea-access prehistoric sites). So I know and approve of justifiable eco violence… But not the sort Malm is advocating… which is grotesque, counterproductive, indiscriminate, hypocritical, a lie… and constitute mass murder, even genocide, as civilization cannot work without fossil fuels at this point…

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In the ridiculous manifesto “How to Blow Up A Pipeline”, claimed saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines, Andreas Malm, a Marxist-like climate change opportunist from Lund University in Sweden, makes a call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics into violence in the face of ecological collapse [1].. We need, he claims, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop– by destroying its tools… start blowing up some oil pipelines. Now, as I point out in the note, and millions of words of my writing testify, I am no shrinking violet… And was personally advocating for ecological violence, in specific and extremely justified cases, when Malm was not even born… But “specific and extremely justified” is the important qualifier. Ecological lessons from Sweden, a country who could not help clear the environment from the Nazis, and got wealthy from them, always smack of consummate hypocrisy.

Sweden has lots of forest, lots of hydro power, and is very wealthy (by dealing with, and profiting from, Hitler… and escaping WW2 devastation). 

In his core section, “Breaking the Spell” (p 65-132) Malm argues for direct violence as ethical. Malm accepts the prevailing view that property damage is a form of violence, but distinguishes violence to property and violence to people. He makes the utilitarian argument that given the failure of corporations and governments to act, the climate movement must begin to escalate its tactics to shut down the fossil fuel infrastructure. He does not seem to realize that shutting down energy shuts down civilization, thus lives. Because he misses the point: there is no alternative to fossil fuels, except a cocktail of nuclear, hydrogen and renewables… That most ecologists reject… allowing them to be de facto for fossil fuels while claiming to be against them..

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We cannot blow up all the pipelines, that’s fantasy. Because we cannot get rid of fossil fuels, at this particular juncture.If we did, that would be criminal: think about all the innocents dying from cold or failing machinery.  I do not like fossil fuels, and I have screamed about planetary heating for decades… but things have to be kept in perspective. 

Saying that “nothing else worked” is tantamount to beating one’s head on a wall, because nothing else worked. Other methods to reduce fossil fuel usage exist: France does with one third of US per capita CO2 production than the USA. Europe with less than half, per capita, per year. 

French CO2 is around the world average. But this hides the fact that more than half the world population emits neglectable amounts of CO2. As that half starts to produce more power, be it only for irrigation, desalination, air conditioning, food production from adaptation to a heating planet, or just living better, they will need energy.

A solution is photovoltaics, but they will need storage, thus the infernal cycle of more precious metals, for batteries, which cannot clearly be done… So we need to develop hydrogen massively… and safe nuclear, thermonuclear or fission. So it is an engineering and science problem.

Patrice Ayme

***[1]. If Malm had really committed eco-terrorism, he would be more discrete about it. I have known eco-terrorists. They were extremely efficient, sabotaging heavy equipment to stop a development, the area concerned is now the Calanques National Park in France (I am saying this as the main organizer was the head of drilling at Total, the French oil giant!!!!!!!!!!!! This friend of mine committed suicide later…). Malm is a scholar of human ecology, teaching at Lund University. He is the author of The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World and Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. So Malm is establishment… Need I say more? The establishment is excellent at promoting buffoons who want to destroy it, thus making people believe that only buffoons with idiotic ideas and reprehensible anger want to destroy it…

This undermining the opposition of the plutocratic governance by ridicule it itself promotes is a variant of the classical method of the “agent provocateur”. Malm is there to incite people to cuddle pipelines…

Solution To The Climate and Pollution Crises? Science! If you want peace, prepare for science!

The PARIS ACCORD IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE. ONLY HARD CORE NEW SCIENCE WILL SOLVE THE ECOLOGICAL CRISES, And Prevent Their Consequences (Wars). New Science has to be invested in, forceful fossil fuel interruption will not work.

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Abstract: “Two degrees is too much” was clear 13 years ago… The Paris Accord pretended to address the problem with self-discipline and a little redistribution of wealth. That strategy is just cosmetic: homilies to self-restraint and electrification all over are not enough. The correct strategy is to do what Homo always did: ”Science the shit out of this”, as The Martian puts it…

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The present civilization is encountering an ecological crisis of the greatest magnitude. The phenomenon is not new. Countless civilizations have encountered such crises in the past, and, as a result, failed. What is new is that the problems we are confronting strongly affect the entire biosphere. And there are several problems, entangled. Some have to do with greenhouse gases: CO2, CH4, NOx, Chlorofluorocarbons; some with agriculture: phosphates, deforestation; some have to do with industry: plastics, heavy metals pollution, etc. Greenhouse gas pollution has made greenhouse forcing revert to what it was twenty million years ago, when Antarctica was covered with forests.  

There is no magical solution out of this situation. Present “solutions”, brandished by self-obsessed politicians, are not really solutions: covering the planet with electric cars, batteries and windmills will not replace fossil fuels, because the fabrication, disposal, and eventual recycling of such cars and batteries and electric engines and generators requires greater pollution and energy than it pretends to solve. At best, nothing much will have happened.

In an act of short termism, and herd behavior, Japan is closing 30 nuclear plants: fossil fuels will replace them, mostly. The nuclear incidents at Fukushima, caused by criminal negligence, killed nobody (although the useless evacuation did). The new fossil plants will kill plenty of people… and biosphere [1].

Asking the entire planet to become much poorer will not work, as governments, let alone We The People, will not agree. The fact is the terrestrial biosphere, given enough time, can handle much higher temperatures. Camels and larches thrived as close to the North Pole as one can, less than three million years ago, with a total CO2 equivalent parts per million significantly lower than today. Homo, the all-powerful species evolved during the most glaciated period.

Thermonuclear Power works. 1952 FILE PHOTO – The mushroom cloud of the first test of a hydrogen bomb, “Ivy Mike”, as photographed on Eniwetok, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean, in 1952, by a member of the United States Air Force’s Lookout Mountain 1352d Photographic Squadron. The top secret film studio, then located in Hollywood ,California, produced thousands of classified films for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission beginning in 1947. A 50th anniversary tribute to these “Atomic Cinematographers” and their work is planned for October 22 in Hollywood. ATOMIC – RTR7YHQ. The problem is to contain it in a room.

So what to do? We have no global solutions now. Ensure that the future will have them. That means investing in researching, or deploying new energy. An energy immediately deployable is “green” hydrogen (it can be mixed into the natural gas infrastructure). And then there is thermonuclear fusion or other near-clean nuclear energy solutions (Thorium, etc).  

So the mentality has to change. Biden wants to spend 74 billion dollars on car battery chargers. Tesla makes most of its profits by selling credits to polluting companies (a government subsidy program). This is happening at the rate of two billion dollars a year. By comparison, the Energy department budget request for 2022 is around 46 billion dollars, out of which the Department of Energy Office of Science’s budget of exactly $7.4 billion. Thus it is rising by $400 million. Very insufficient (although worse in nearly all other countries, with the exception of China, of course…)  

Expanding the science budget means to expand it in all directions. Because all directions are useful, potentially. Famously, Faraday, a research physicist paid directly by the British monarch, having discovered Faraday law.

Faraday demonstrated some basic science for senior politicians. One of those critters asked: “What is its use?”. Faraday recycled Benjamin Franklin’s observation, a few decades earlier, when he was asked what use could possibly have all these balloon experiments Franklin had witnessed in Paris:”…it may pave the way for some new discoveries in Natural Philosophy at present we have no conception of…” Pushed back by some contradictors, who couldn’t see what new science could be involved, Franklin retorted:”What’s the use of a new-born baby?” 

Faraday’s law of induction (briefly, Faraday’s law) is a basic law of electromagnetism predicting how a magnetic field will interact with an electric circuit to produce an electromotive force (EMF)—a phenomenon known as electromagnetic induction. It is the fundamental operating principle of transformers, inductors, and many types of electrical motors, generators and solenoids. Around 1830, it looked as if electricity was of no use for civilization. Now we have an electric civilization. All of society, all the electricity generation (except Photovoltaics), including all the green energy drive, depends upon the induction law [2]. The photovoltaic effect was discovered at the same time by some obscure Frenchman… That looked like an anecdote, until the physicist Hertz found many peculiarities related to it (and which Einstein elucidated, long after Hertz’s death, with Planck’s quantum).

The USA has 331 million people. Just China plus India have ten times the population of the USA. No matter what “help” the USA can give those two by holding their hands would be not just presumptuous, but ineffective. However, if the USA and the EU invent new energy, that would be very helpful to the rest of the world, especially countries like Niger. When the French administered Niger last, in 1960, there were 3.4 million inhabitants there. Now there are 25 million in this mostly desertic country. Women there have an average of eight babies or so. This is typical of subsaharan Africa.

So we need to accelerate science. It is a matter of saving civilization. Because only science can save the future. 

When a Euro-American probe passed by Enceladus, it took pictures of water plumes. Enceladus, a little moon of Saturn, has a gigantic ocean of water. Said ocean has existed for more than four billion years. A probe equipped to fly through and analyze the plumes for organics should have long been launched. It was not, so we don’t know if life has evolved there and if not, why not.

An occasion was missed.

Those sorts of probes push inspiration, imagination, science and tech to its limits.  An example is thinking about what happened to Venus… thanks in part from information by earlier probes, including a European one which practiced aerobraking… It turns out that Venus probably had life, and an ocean, for three billion years… And then a run-away greenhouse. So Venusian science helps us visualize potential futures… Venusian climate was impacted by the planet’s very slow rotation: an effect we do not have, Earth rotating 200 times faster… 

There is only one solution to the ecological crises we have created: science. And science we do not have, or do not master yet… 

All the rest is smoke and mirrors… 

In particular, the Paris Accord is worthless: countries are supposed to reduce their CO2 emissions… But most countries simply cannot… Absent a scientific miracle… which only wealthy countries can produce. But, instead of producing said miracle, by spending a lot of money on science for new energy, wealthy countries are supposed to give to the poor, as if Mr. Climate Catastrophe could be bought with cash. So the Paris’ Accord entire drive, money as panacea, is grotesque, deeply immoral and strategically tragic [3].

Indeed that offering of money would be better spent doing scientific research.

Strategically tragic also in part because scientific supremacy by the dominant civilization insures peace, and only this supremacy does that (The most advanced Greek city states and Republican Rome understood this).

Some civilizations, confronted to ecological devastation they caused, were able to save themselves by taking scientific action: the Egyptians retreated to the Nile, the Sumerians went up rivers, the entire Middle East introduced hydraulic dictatorships and their water works, Middle Age Europe and Japan took drastic actions to save the forests. In all cases, they analyzed the situation and found solutions. The Roman state did not, thus collapsed.

If you want peace, prepare for science.

If you want sustainability, muster science.

If you want an optimal future,  invent a lot of new hard science.

Wishful thinking is no alternative.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Although Japan is talking about creating a hydrogen economy. That’s great, as I have long advocated. However, Japan rolled out its first hydrogen transportation ship. It is supposed to bring (dirty, not green) hydrogen from Australia; the ship carries as much energy as a briefcase with the appropriate fissile materials (which can be recycled). 

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[2] Electric tech depends upon magnets, and the higher performing, the better. Thus huge quantities of rare heavy metals are used, say in windmills. Efficient windmills, as big as skyscrapers, kill birds, and are visual and auditory nightmares; even if replaced by windwalls or the like, with smaller mills in a wall (that has been proposed). 

The material in a Tesla battery is worth around $1500 – but the market value is between $10,000 and $15,000,’ due to precision manufacturing. To get those materials, including expensive, toxic cobalt, you have to disassemble the battery (without it catching fire!), you have to crush it, you have to process it in some kind of recycling process. And then you only have a couple hundred dollars left. 

The toxic materials required by all this electric tech are produced in work friendly environments such the Congolese jungle, full of helpful children who don’t go to school for you, eco battery enthusiasts, or in countries colonized by the just as friendly People Republic of China, where thousands of Uyghurs are keen to be recycled as servants of those who love to pose as ecologically correct.

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[3] Full disclosure: I know personally one of the plutocrats who authored the Paris Accord. He has a PhD in (pseudo) physics from Princeton, but he hates me so much that he got my daughter kicked out of her Franco-American school. At least, she was, and so he told me he would make it so. This is the sort of individual who has a fleet of (Tesla) expensive model electric cars, but he can’t even go between his mansions with them.

Science, Philosophy, And That Necessity, A Potential Drug, Faith

Science is a body of (rather certain) knowledge, and a method, based on demonstrable repetitive truths. Philosophy is also a body of (more fuzzy, but indispensable) knowledge, and also a method, based on faith, emotions, and guesses, to guide us towards reality.

Philosophy without science cannot be, and science is always born from the philosophical method, especially when it jumps forward into new dimensions. Philosophy and science are the extremities of a spectrum of behaviors yearning at the truth.

A meta-truth being, of course that some truths are to be denied, because they do not enable us to build an effective field theory of optimal behaviors.

We all use faith, millions of times a day: how could we otherwise be sure what knowledge is? Faith insures that truth guides us. So faith was evolutionary invented to make science possible. Its fundamental architecture is set in neuronal networks. A marmoset monkey uses faith all day long. Faith is more than a method or an instinct: it is an architecture.

The fundamental faith-based system is the architecture of the brain itself. Every day we encounter the meta-truth that truth is most useful, and having faith in it, indispensable. Yet it is true that we can misuse faith, with the drug of superstition, an opium for the soul. Superstition, as its name indicates, stands above reality, as it is culturally created. And that truth, that abandonment to superstition works to give pleasure, often needs to be denied, as all it leads to is war… Which is often not optimal.

Too much faith in too many stupid, or highly offensive things. What happens when superstitious faith takes over, giving free reins to the basest instincts… some of them self-destructive, in the tribal version of apoptosis. Gaza under retaliatory Israel Defense Force bombing, May 15, 2021… A 3,200 years old story, newcomers beware of making fools of yourself, by looking at what just happened… and only that.

How are (pseudo-)philosophical concepts such as essence and existence defined? That’s ad hoc and mysterious. As Heidegger would complain, where is the hand at work? Tellingly, he was a heavy perpetrator of what he complained about. It is not just silly, but dramatic, when philosophy embraces the undefinable useless for a base. This is how individuals such as Sartre, De Beauvoir, embraced Hitler and later Castro and Mao… All along truly making a fool of the wisdom they claimed to embrace… Which was Sartre and De beauvoir market value, as far as plutocrats were concerned…

To see how definitions of the basics work, study physics, and its outgrowths, logics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, geology, engineering. There is No Alternative. Why? Because physics, mathematics and logics spend their main efforts on the foundations… And they connect to the proverbial hand… namely experiments. Yes, physical experiments in pure physics, but also so-called thought experiments… And experiments also exist in logics and math, namely by trying to construct explicit models.

Yes we need faith, but we also need to learn to keep it effective, and checked by reason. Yes we need science and philosophy and both, just as faith, are everywhere. None of these go without conscience. “La sagesse ne peut pas entrer dans un esprit méchant. Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme“. François Rabelais, twenty years a monk, then doctor, surgeon, writer, philosopher, and later highest level State Counsel in Pantagruel (his major work, 1532 CE [1]). (I disagree with the first idea: some wisdom can enter a vicious mind; but the second holds… A ruined soul can be wise in other ways, alas…)

Con-science, is what goes with a body of knowledge, the meta-knowledge all and any knowledge need (any logic L needs a meta-logic ML which defines what truth is in L…)

Science, philosophy and faith without conscience only ruin souls….

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Rabelais, long under a threat of heresy he escaped from his powerful friends, so his good friend, student and fellow anatomist Etienne Dolet burned alive at 37 years old. However Rabelais, living testimony that the scurrents of positive progress were strong in France at the time, ended as a Master of Requests (maître des requêtes), a counsel of the French Conseil d’État (Council of State),^[1] the highest-level judicial officer of administrative law in France, This Supreme Court has existed in one form or another since the Middle Ages…. in 1302 CE, under Philippe IV Le Bel

Expect The Unexpectable, History Of Science Says, Evolving Common Sense

Expecting the unexpectable evolves common sense to a higher form. There is no scientific method, per se. There is common sense, which has been “scientifically” driven, that is facts driven, certainty driven, for ten million years, or more.

Even a bear, or a mountain lion have (a lot of) common sense (and those who do not want to be eaten have to dialogue correctly with the common sense of their potential predator; that’s why once I hit an aggressive youngish bear with a big rock, to knock some common sense into him, reminding him the evidence that attacking a human was expensive and dangerous [1]; bears and mountain lions understand the language of flying rocks very well, and attribute respect to those who can command to them…). 

Because science is common sense propelled, there is no “method” for finding new science, as the famous physicist Feynman pointed out very unambiguously in his Lectures on Physics. When new facts are uncovered, common sense has to work hard to articulate them into logic (a live example of this is entanglement in Quantum Physics; I have proposed a way out that nobody else has proposed, namely a finite speed “Quantum” interaction; the point being, the idea has to be tried). 

Now some superstitious religions target common sense, deliberately… with the aim of demolishing the notion of common sense, because populations which cannot make sense can be exploited. An example are sects in a religion according to which, if you say that only cretins would believe that a so-called prophet flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse, you should be killed… for “blasphemy”. 

I think, therefore I watch for the expected unexpectable… Torres Paine, Patagonia…

By contrast, in Western Europe, the concept of “cretin” was derived from “christianus“… Fanatical Christians were not held in high esteem, but rather as mental retards. This shows a completely different, highly disrespectful mood towards fanaticism. And reading Middle Age literature be it at the popular or academic level, shows an extremely skeptical attitude to Christianism as an end-all, be-all. 

Actually European Middle Age popular literature, at least in the center of intellectual civilization, France, casually insists, for centuries, that “scripture”, when it evokes it, may well be a big lie (“Se l’Escriture ne nous ment“, if Scripture does not lie to us, is a preferred formula in the 1100s). In the end Western European common sense killed the mood which said that accusing them of blasphemy was a plausible reason for killing rebels against the established order (even the tyrant Louis XIV of France had to put an end to the nonsense of making witchcraft a crime in 1682, describing it as fraudulent magic, a definition which did not as such prevent witch trials, but made it difficult to convict people of a capital crime). 

However, in some regions dominated by some Muslim sects, after making religious fundamentalism illegal around 1200 CE, there was a relapse (some of it in part an indirect effect of the conquest by the Mongols, which killed the intellectuals), and that’s how what was once the world’s wealthiest region became the poorest: because it got bereft of common sense… And that was all a plot.

In today’s world, scientific progress is a must to insure the survival of civilization, and its eight billion bearers. COVID, if nothing else, has made this clear: many thinkers, for the longest time, had forecasted that terrible pandemics were around the corner (among other incoming disasters)… In part because of jet travel, which made “tourists” travel arguably in worse conditions than slaves of the Atlantic slave trade a pandemic danger (slaves could lay down, and had to exercise an hour a day of the slave ships… Only first class travel allows you to lay down…) For ecological reasons, this sort of mass travel was already morally deplorable.

Some hope that fighting climate change is just a few regulations away (like outlaw mass air travel). That seems to be the “common sense” driving Biden and company. It is an erroneous common sense. The correct sense, not yet common, is that “Climate change” will not get under control without drastically new technology, driven by new science…

So how to get new science? Well, from new common sense… How can common sense become “new”? From new facts. Common sense is built from common observations. Common sense will vary according to what people commonly observe. 

For example, old common sense, up to a few generations ago, said that what was small was like what was big, just smaller. An application was the “homunculus” theory: that humans started initially with very small reproductions of themselves, and then those homunculi grew big. Modern biology has a very different (sketch of an) explanation: it starts with DNA. 

When I was a child, my own dad once told me in Africa that to believe the very small was just like the very big, just smaller, made… no sense. And indeed this is what Quantum Physics has determined: Quantum Waves rule, and they do not accept to be put in boxes, as, after all, they are waves, hence non local… So, observing these new facts, common sense can only be inspired, and change: the solution to the very small is the nonlocal. There is no very small, there is instead there is the very much, not there… 

This sort of example extracted from science tells common sense it needs to evolve, and realize that, often, the problem is not the problem. Instead, an unexpected solution is found, changing the problem to something with higher dimensions. Old observations then become something flat, labyrinths observed from above. And thus is a root meta-observation of common sense looking at all theories, past, present, and future: expect the unexpectable...   

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The bear, in remote backcountry, Little Yosemite Valley, had attacked half a dozen hikers half an hour earlier, persuading them to leave their backpacks for ursine inspection and taxation. I did not surrender mine, and I got charged… But I defended myself successfully. The bear was shot and killed by rangers three weeks later. 

Truth And Science Have Replaced Fangs and Claws In Human Beings

Science, and, more generally, truth, is a moral imperative.

Humanity has become a singularity, a nonlinear phenomenon: it has taken over the biosphere, and acts as a virus against anything alive. Climate change caused by humanity is exponentiating: it is growing ever faster at an increasing speed proportional to itself, as the direct impact of humanity is amplified by the natural effects it unleashes. 

Coronavirus is an effect of that exponentiation of humanity. If humanity’s nefarious impact is increasing, we need to exponentiate science too, to learn to compensate. That means much more financing, but also much more orientation of young people towards truth and knowledge, rather than towards the latest celebrity or sport figure. 

Science is not a new phenomenon: humanity evolved from it, and is its biological vector. It required quite a bit of knowledge to survive in the wild, 200,000 years ago, while being human, that meant without the fangs, claws, strength, or the trees to take refuge in, of the chimpanzees.  Humans became truth machines. 

Civilizations are characterized by their moods. Their attitude relative to science, and, more generally truth, is what determines their survival when facing ecological deperishment or devastation, and the attending invasions. An aggravating factor today is that we have one world civilization, using resources at several times the sustainable rate. 

 

The general increasing stupidification obvious in school test scores is caused by those who own the media, and have interest to keep humanity silly and unaware. 

 

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Related to the preceding, Stephen Jones kindly congratulated me for my “Very thoughtful prose” on Masters of War, but wondered: What’s the beef with giving Nobel Prizes? That part didn’t resonate with me.

Thanks Stephen! I don’t like prizes in general, the way they are attributed now. One point is that the Nobel prizes are part of the establishment, that’s why Sartre declined his Nobel. The establishment behaves as the highest judge and donator, it’s all about mutual back scratching, at best. Giving prizes makes the thinking establishment acknowledging the superiority of the powers that be. That’s the wrong priority, as it turns truth into a way to create flesh and blood celebrities, as if this was the ultimate aim, all along, of thinking..

But that’s just part of the problem with prizes. Obama got a Nobel for no discernible accomplishment. All together, the establishment celebrates famous people… rather than famous ideas. And thus teached the youth that the celebrity of people is more important than the celebrity of ideas… Contrarily to what happens with young children.

Now this observation is not new: Albert Einstein didn’t get the Nobel for Relativity because the Nobel Committee knew Lorentz (who got the Nobel thanks to Poincare)… and Poincare, got the theory before… Still Einstein got the fame for Relativity, and that’s, actually, a theoretical problem (his approach denies a global frame… yet it exists, at least mathematically). So prizes: 1) reinforce the establishment. 2) do not put the fame where it should be… thus distancing from people what science is.

Are prizes necessarily bad? Am I sour because of what once happen with a prize of mine, long long time ago? Am I so anti-establishment because I am not part of it? Yes to all the preceding. Prizes could be mainly useful when they push ideas and authors who have been ignored, but deserve a good look.

At it is, the establishment is very monolithic, and prizes, medal, memberships, prestigious appurtenance and other ceremonial ribbons are what enables the establishment to claim gravitas, respect and diversity.

The freer wisdom is, the greater. And there is no better way to cage than with caresses…

Patrice Ayme

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Notes: 1) The Nobel Com spread the disinformation that Einstein didn’t get his Nobel in 1921, for Relativity supposedly because Bergson didn’t like Local Time Theory. That is disinformation: Poincare, beefing up on Lorentz, invented this, Local Time. Bergson got the Nobel (in philosophy) later.

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I developed my objections to prizes in early 2015…

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/how-plutocrats-buy-god/

And the NYT followed suit in the Fall:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/10/06/the-folly-of-big-science-prizes/

Si Vis Pacem, Para Scientiam: Science For War, War For Science

Si Vis Pacem, Para Scientiam? If you want peace, prepare for science? The original Latin proverb is: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. If you want peace, prepare war. Cute, but not enough. My proverb is more to the point.

At first the original Roman proverb, want peace, prepare war, sounds pretty deep, in the philosophy of military science, and so did I feel, for decades…

However, in the end the Romans were defeated. They didn’t get defeated once, or a few times, and then ultimately won the wars… As the Franks/French did so many times. No, the Romans, starting under Marcus Aurelius, started to lose… and lose, and lose, didn’t not recover very well, and finally, two centuries later, by 406 CE, four years before the fall of Rome to the Goths, the empire was riddled with armed German nations [1].  

So the proverb was nearly right, thus still wrong, a near-miss, the equivalent of the big splash the Bismarck succeeded to land next to one of the two British battleships assaulting it, drenching the command deck of its enemy… but failing to score. The British did score, though, and, within minutes, the Bismarck had lost the ability to aim its fire, becoming just a big fat target for the Brits.

By 406 CE, the Roman empire was also a big fat target for the Barbarians. To try to defeat the Goths later, the Romans had to muster an army mostly made of Huns at Toulouse. The Goths still won and killed the Roman general. That defeat of  Litorius was in 439 CE. In 451 CE, after being chased and harassed by a Frankish army, a coalition of Franks, Goths and Romans (under the plausibly double dealing generalissimo Aetius) defeated the Huns spectacularly.

Clearly the Romans were fighting a lot, prepared or not, and prepared to this mess, they were not. Something deeper had gone very wrong. Actually Aetius was assassinated later in palace intrigue.   

Because they only prepared for war, the Romans lost to the other guys, because the other guys had also prepared for war; the Parthians, then the Sassanids, and finally, worse of all, the Arabs. The Romans should have prepared for (more) science.

Greek fire was a sort of napalm spewed from metallic machines which could spew enormous fire at great range, from 15 meters to up to 450 meters when loaded on catapults. In the first battle which saved Constantinople, more than 2,000 Arab ships were destroyed, and only seven (7) survived! There was a repeat of that latter. Then the Arabs launched the plan of taking Constantinople from behind (as the Turks would o, seven centuries later!). So the Arabs conquered North Africa, Spain… Only to see three successive invasions of Francia crushed to smithereens, causing the fall of Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus… Greek fire was used to destroy the Arab fleet in the Gulf of Saint Tropez in the Tenth Century, while a Frankish army was pressing inland on the Muslim redoubt at la Garde Freinet. The Arabs never figured out how it worked… And we still don’t know, actually, so well guarded was the secret. In comparison, how to make nuclear bombs is no secret…

Greek Fire had saved the Oriental empire. It was then superseded by black powder. French engineers (more exactly the Bureau brothers) were able to make field guns, guns which could be wheeled into a moving battlefield, with which twenty years after roasting Joan of Arc, the “100” Year War was won…

To make sure one will win, one doesn’t just need overwhelming force [2]. One needs overwhelming smarts. Heraclius, the Roman emperor who defeated the Sassanids, was one of humanity’s greatest generals, achieving an incredible Blitzkrieg. However, Heraclius had fallen ill and was unable to personally lead his armies to resist the Arab conquests of Syria and Roman Paelestina in 634 (he was sick in Alexandria). An incredibly stupid tactical engagement of the vastly superior Roman army, in a place that put it at a heavy disadvantage, using impatient, foolhardy tactics, led to its defeat by the much smaller (40,000) Arab army. The Arabs then did something no one expected: they killed all males in age of bearing arms. (So here we are!)

But the really deep question is: why had it become a fair fight between Romans and Barbarians? How come Barbarians had achieved military technological equality? In short: because Rome had become a stupid dictatorship. Excuse the pleonasm: all dictatorships are stupid, my dear Marx! 

What keeps the peace nowadays? Some erroneously believe that’s because we are all so civilized. They look at the plutocrats who feed them to say such inanities, and they love themselves for being so smart.  A casual look at leading politicians show that this is not the case: civilization is not improving, just Machiavellianism (as happened in Late Rome). 

Peace is kept, because the three leading military powers of the West have no interest to wage war; they already have what they want, profit from the status quo… And the leading Western military powers have had, recently, huge military technological superiority (now quickly fading, though…) 

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“Fourth Spy Unearthed in U.S. Atomic Bomb Project
His Soviet code name was Godsend, and he came to Los Alamos from a family of secret agents.”

The New York Times just ran an article exposing still one more spy at the heart of the Manhattan project, the nuclear bomb. A spy no one knew existed before, a physicist who was spying with the apparent help of his brothers. When the spies fled to the USSR in the early fifties, the FBI kept it secret (to keep the existence of its own informants secret). 

In any case, the Manhattan project leaked a lot; there were a lot of “Communists” at the time among intellectuals (“Communist” meant, in practice, at the time, infeodated to the fascist Stalin…) Carried over, the ebullient PM Churchill wanted to imprison indefinitively the top French atomic scientists… because they knew so much [3] 

The Manhattan project’s ancestor was launched in France in January 1938, thanks to the discovery by Nobel Irene Curie of the nuclear chain reaction with U235. [6]

Differently from the French, German scientists didn’t know a bomb was possible. French scientists and their plans fled to Britain, part of the materials was sheltered underground with the Crown Jewels, then the entire project transferred to Canada and the US. 

Secrecy in military matters is crucial: had the Nazis known in 1938 what the French knew, they would have developed a nuclear bomb. A better way to slow down neutrons was found (boron); then Plutonium created in reactors, the implosion pit invented with neutron triggers, etc. Lots of crucial details.

Too much Western (military) tech flows to the regime of dictator Xi, through armies of dual use spies, and Chinese investment in universities related startups.

Military superiority of (representative pseudo-) democracy, is a war the West can’t lose against blatant dictatorships. Rome, initially equipped with Gallic (!) weaponry, lost military superiority to Parthians, Sassanids, Goths. Yet, 

Constantinople was saved by Gregian fire (700 CE). Ever since Franks and their successors kept military technological superiority; that’s how the West (“democracy”) won!

Science for war, war for science. It has been going for millions of years. Progress doesn’t come cheap. It first have to fight those who want none. For a whole bunch of reasons. From the prosaic, to the most petty [4]. Those in power find progress hard, because, by definition, it means a move forward (forward (pro)-walk (gradi)), Any move is a threat to the establishment [5].

Science, and the scientific method, are as old as the genus Homo (and certainly older). How many today could go naked in the bush, and survive? Not many, because they don’t know much, starting with making and feeding fire… War rewards smarts, and reciprocally. Is it mean, is it hopeless? No, it just is. Science is about what is, and war about creating more of what is [7].

Progress is not innocuous: it’s a war, war against the unknown, war against the certainties of the past, and an understanding moving forward. In any case, it messes minds up, and many don’t like that… Especially when someone else starts the mess [8]. Well, they will still be pushed out of the way…

Ultimately, the giant walls of Constantinople fell to the giant guns of the Muslim invader. And a civilization fell. Did the famed (and imaginary) “Muslim science” (Islamophiles love to promote) succeed that feat? No. The engineers who made those guns were Hungarians. The assault troops who stormed Constantinople were “Janaissaries” Islamized slaves who had been captured as the Christian boys they were… and then brainwashed, imprinted, indoctrinated, and made offers they couldn’t refuse (everything they want, or impalement).

Dictatorships don’t play nice. Later printing was enough to earn the death penalty in Turkey, and that lasted centuries (in France too, but only if unauthorized, and it didn’t last; thanks Francois I for that). Right now the West’s technology is leaking to Xi, a dictator (he says it himself…) OK, maybe he is a “friend” of Trump, but that is still no excuse, let alone a guarantee, and the West should meditate the preceding…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Ironically, in the Seventh Century, after a horrendous war, the Romans, launching themselves south from Armenia, destroyed the Sassanids. However, this is just after this that the crafty Muhammad attacked… an exhausted Roman army, and a devastated Sassanid army and schizoid, civil war government. So, weirdly, Roman triumph was quickly followed by the destruction and occupation of ⅔ of the empire… 

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[2] Overwhelming force failed during the Battle of France of 1940: all together, it looked as if France and Britain couldn’t be defeated. And actually the French Foreign Legion had put to flight, after two combined air-sea landings, elite Nazi divisions to flight in Norway. At the famous Midway battle. A small US fleet sank a more than twice bigger, in aircraft carriers alone Japanese fleet (and the Japs had a whole battleship fleet on top of that).

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[3] Irene Curie and company were indeed dedicated Communists… until at the world intellectual Communist Congress in 1953 the Soviet delegate called Sartre a “dactylographic hyena”… The French delegation, headed by Irene, stormed out…

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[4] A friend of mine a research Quantum Computing pure mathematician with chair and all the bells and whistles, medals and paid CO2 travelling, sent me a cartoon of Scott Aaronson, a revered figure of Quantum Computing software. The idea, apparently was to make fun of the ideas I proposed on Quantum and Brain. I am used to being made fun in that domain (50 years and counting)… And I sort of count Penrose among my students, so I am used to scoff.

However, why are paid intellectuals so motivated to be offensive to others, even at the price of being idiotic? It’s the old monkey coming out. They are looking for prestige, and want to pull rank. It’s not enough that they are paid to think. It’s even actually, a secret flaw: in spite of all the honors, isn’t it what prostitute do? Money for posing?

Oh, and the cartoon shows Aaronson either doesn’t know Quantum Physics at undergraduate level, or doesn’t hesitate to mislead the public about it… Just to claim he has the awe and mystery, with his Quantum computing algorithm, and others have not. Hopefully more on this later… Got me to think about the axioms of Quantum Physics…

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[5] This is why the establishment hates Trump so much; because he moves things, and ask why is it the son of Biden gets diamonds from a Chinese plutocrat? And the like. Amusingly, when Macron started to tax tech giants at 3% revenue (as yours truly had begged for for more than a decade…), Trump went all enraged… But apparently Macron was able to talk him out of reprisals against France… Trump, a pure product of the financial establishment and its entanglement with subsidized construction, has been so vilified over the years, that he turned into an enemy of the establishment, where it hurts. The opposite can happen, the most famous case being Perikles… who ended up passing anti-immigrant laws who hurt Athens and himself, and were completely contradictory to the start of his political career… Also, he destroyed Athens in the guise of saving it… Powerful men turn into rogue rockets at the drop of a pin. That’s why we should organize the world to do without them…

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[6] Maybe because I pointed out the origin of the Manhattan project in France, the New York Times censored my comment in the article linked above. But that was so true the nuclear business with Norway was probably a factor in Hitler’s invasion. In any case, when Norway fell to the Nazis, so full of spies Norway was, that the flight carrying, supposedly, heavy water to France was intercepted by the Luftwaffe. However, French agents had secretly transferred the heavy water into another plane on the airfield, and the heavy water escaped the Nazis…  Long live the new York Times and its Uber Alles view of history!

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[7] Civilization, as it is, was created by war (in particular, the USA, in its extravagant beauty). The PC establishment doesn’t want to be reminded of that, because it’s sponsored by the plutocratic establishment, which itself, would prefer to see everybody asleep, far from any rebellious passion…

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[8] I have seen individuals who make a show to project equanimity, gravitas get all enraged… when I proposed to change something to the US Constitution… It’s funny how something so small spiritually can engage minds: Homo takes thinking seriously, even fatally… That’s actually a strength of the species as it provides an environment in which mental progress can thrive…

 

 

 

 

What Use Philosophy?

Only Philosophy will teach the children well:

STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics), or STEAM (adding “Arts” to the preceding) are the latest (well justified) fashion in teaching children in the USA (inspired by China and Singapore). The method is spreading (and I contributed to push it). However, a subject has been forgotten, the most important: philosophy (and, in particular, the history upon which it rests!)

Like science, philosophy is a sum over histories. But it isn’t just that. Like science, philosophy is a method. Like science, the engine of philosophy is unbiased common sense. Yet, a more general method. Like science, philosophy uses facts, and is itself, among other things, a set of facts (not forgetting that ideas and emotions are, themselves, facts). Yet, philosophy doesn’t just use scientific facts (that is, facts beyond any suspicion). Like science, philosophy is a method of enquiry to guess further facts. Like science, philosophy establishes systems of thought. Like science, philosophy can use a single fact to put in doubt a system of thought, and build another. Unlike science though, philosophy can guess facts, and propose (or even establish) systems of thought on those guesses.

Hence philosophy, the philosophical method, common sense applied to whatever, is the key to major advances in science. Major advances in science call upon, and necessitate, guessing the imaginable. They call upon the philosophical method. No philosophical method, no major advances in science possible. Indeed, any major advance in science is built on new facts, and to go fetch those new facts require desire, hope, imagination, systems of potentialities, fancy financing on fumes, curiosity about what could be, etc.

Our bodies love to dance, in part because we love music, part of our dialogue with the universe. Learning to learn, or just to tolerate others’ music is not just pleasant, it’s enriching, a form of wealth which honors the spirit, source of all and any goodness, besides being our very essence!

Buridan’s momentum, force, inertia, relativity of motion and heliocentrism in the Fourteenth Century provide a  nice example of philosophy & science entangled:

Indeed Buridan (circa 1340 CE) guessed that Aristotle’s false physics depended upon neglecting air resistance and friction in general. Absent those errors, what was left was the theory of inertia, a particular case of impetus theory. Buridan noted that we can only ever observe relative motions. We cannot really know absolute motions. So if, for example, we happened to be in a boat going along a coastline, we really don’t know whether the boat we are in is moving or if the coastline is moving alongside us. Nicole Oresme pushed further the physics unmoved on a movable ship argument (replicated by Galileo 250 years later).

A consequence was that a heliocentric system, with planets orbiting the sun indefinitely (and the Earth rotating on itself) was a possibility. Buridan then slyly said that such a system couldn’t be distinguished experimentally from the one in “Scripture”, so we may as well believe the latter. It was an invitation to develop other observations.

Amazingly, both (rector) Buridan and (elected bishop in 1377 CE!) Oresme, having removed all reasons against heliocentrism, and having argued that it was more economical a system of thought, then said it couldn’t be decided, pointed out that this failure showed the limits of reason, and thus that reason couldn’t be used against (their) faith: “What I have said here, by way of diversion of intellectual exercise can in this manner serve as a valuable means of refuting and checking those who would like to impugn our faith by argument.”

“Argument” (reason) is a very powerful, says Oresme, but not powerful enough to determine whether the Earth moves or not. Similarly, if “argument” cannot answer a physical question about the world, we have to be very careful about arguing about faith. Oresme has therefore used rational arguments about physics, involving relativity of motion, to show rational argument can come short, in physics, and thus metaphysics (“faith”).

This is a magnificent example of how entangled science, philosophy and… faith, are.

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Trying to teach science alone is trying to teach the chicken, how it moves, without its head (philosophy):

Philosophy goes much further than science and its scientific method, as the philosophical method, which uses whatever, enables to establish systems of thought using whatever, including emotions, songs and poetry (the great Twelfth Century philosopher was relatively as famous as the Beatles for his songwriting; even more than Buridan and Oresme, Abelard was in total war with the Catholic Church, namely Saint Bernard; he got emasculated and excommunicated for it…) In particular, philosophy establishes wisdoms of life: why and how to live. Can’t live without it. It may as well be taught, lest all young end up as Jihadists, snowflakes, or culture deprived nerds.

Here is a bit of the love of more advanced wisdom. More advanced philosophy enables to listen to music others, less mentally advanced types, can’t hear. Therein a happiness others are deprived from. However, establishing new thinking inside one’s brain is expensive, not just expansive, and involves suffering. Thus, some whine, Nietzsche prefered suffering to happiness. (Not really true: Nietzsche observed that lions are happy, and  imagined them happy not to be mice… Bertrand Russell, like all good hypocrites, practicing the opposite of what they preach, disingenuously called Nietzsche not compassionate… While siding with the despicable Kaiser in World War One… while Nietzsche correctly vomited the preceding Kaiser already)

Here is a relevant philosophical perspective Buddha himself blithely ignored: IF ONE PREFERS SUFFERING TO HAPPINESS, HOW CAN THINGS GET WORSE? Verily, suffering and happiness are entangled: happiness is best experienced, like the best tsunami, with the contrasting experience, of a lowering of expectations…

Philosophy at its best. Science can’t do that.  

Science can study suffering, science can’t say why one should study suffering, and what to do with it. Only philosophy can do that, thus only philosophy can order science to get going.

We, humans, have been scientists, for millions of years, but so are we, because we love to be wise. That’s how we are. Neglecting the love of wisdom is neglecting us. It is easy to see how greedy potentates will want to neglect us. Let them not have it. In ancient Rome, philosophy failed first, followed by the failure of democracy, then intelligence. Teach philosophy to children, and, if you don’t, ultimately science and technology themselves will falter, as they did in Rome, barbarity will win, as civilization won’t be sustainable anymore. 

To finish how we started here, the most important subject to teach, with heart and mind, is the most encompassing philosophical attitude. How to do this with children? By teaching them the history of civilizations (notice the plural). Killing two birds with one stone. The rise of violent Muslim Fundamentalism in Europe, in particular France, is directly attributable to an astounding lack of knowledge of history among not just the young, but also self-described “intellectuals” (multiple shootings and wounded in France again today, March 23, 2918, in attacks claimed by Daesch, the so-called Islamist State… no problem we shall just live in a state of siege, adorned by shootings in the streets, schools, supermarkets…)

Generally when taught, in only in one hour, the rough circumstances of Muhammad’s ascent to the position of Mecca’s dictator, a discernible mental shift among young Muslims is discernible. It’s just astounding that this telling part of history is not taught anywhere in French schools (all the more as France is a direct political, cultural and legal descendant of the Roman State, half of which got violently invaded, and ruined… by the immediate successors (“Caliphs“) of Muhammad…

China, Europe, India, are the major scientific, and technological powers of civilization. It is no coincidence that they are also the philosophical superpowers.

Human is the philosophical animal. And science, facts known for sure, a consequence. Art also: try to make symbols that will last 50,000 years… without any science.

You want life and the pursuit of happiness? Let society pursue philosophy first!

Patrice Aymé

 

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Science and Philosophy: two aspects of the same thing. Why they are separated.

Separating philosophy from science is like separating breathing in, from breathing out.

Philosophy is how one guesses, science is how one makes sure.

To this “Jan Sand” retorted: ‘Science is how one attempts to make sure.’

Well, no. Attempting is no science. Hope enables one to live, but it’s not life. “One makes sure” comes with a context, the context enabling to express the problem and the answer attached to it.

Science is both a method, and a field of knowledge. Both are relative to the context at hand. The method consists in using only elements of reality one is sure of.

In their context, for example, classical optics, mechanics, electromagnetism and thermodynamics are all appropriate and correct. Yet, they don’t work next to a Black Hole: a Black Hole is the wrong context for them.

The first interstellar asteroid is a shard, probably a metallic one. It was observed to cover the Earth-Moon distance in less than three hours. With the nes telescopes being built, it is the first of many.

Consider the first Interstellar Asteroid, or, more probably, comet, was observed passing by the sun, on a highly hyperbolic trajectory. Speed: 139,000 kilometer per hour. Color: the deep red of the severely irradiated material (an orange like picture was obtained). No water or other volatile element (or so it seemed… although since it accelerated after passing the Sun, as small comets tend to do, it was probably outgazing…). Albedo (reflectivity) could vary between one and ten. Making an absolute hypothesis of what the albedo is, its size would one hundred meters across, a kilometer long. Found first by an Hawaiian telescope, its name is 1I ‘Oumuamua (Reach out first first; “1I for First Interstellar”)

This is all science, because many telescope, including Europe’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) in Chile, observed the object, and science dating more than 4 centuries has made telescope highly reliable (although cardinals initially demurred).

Rubbing sticks vigorously just so will enable to bring in such high temperature, as to start a fire: that’s science. (The fundamental science of humanity, 1.3 million years old.)

But not all “attempts” at “making sure” turn out to be science. Philosophy is what organizes these attempts.

For “superstrings”, it was felt that, instead of supposing point-particles, one could suppose strings, and some problems would disappear. Other problems would disappear if one supposed a symmetry between fermions and bosons. Thus “superstrings” came to be.

Superstrings is certainly a sort of logic, but not science. In particular, it makes no peculiar predictions, aside from the hypotheses it started with!

Similarly, Euclidean geometry pushed all the way, is unending logic, not science (because it has nothing to do with reality, it says nothing relevant to reality, once pushed far enough).

Most famously, epicycle theory was a sort-of logic, with some truths mixed in, but not science: it turned out to be 100% false (although the Fourier analysis hidden therein gave it some respectability, because parts of a lie can be true).

I have my own proposal for Sub Quantum Reality (“SQPR”). It is an attempt. It is astoundingly smart. It does make predictions, and explains some significant phenomena, for example Dark Matter, Dark Energy. So it looks good. However, it is not science.

Why?

Because my theory makes extraordinary claims giving a completely different picture of physics, extremely far from the facts and moods which give meaning to both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

So SQPR would need extraordinary proofs.

One could be simply that all other explanations for Dark Matter fail, and only SQPR is left standing.

A more direct proof would be that SQPR predicts a measurable difference in energy distribution during the famous 2-slit experiment from the prediction Albert Einstein explicitly made. If it turned out to be true that my prediction is correct on this, pretty much all of existing physics becomes false, or, let’s say more precisely, it becomes a very good approximation to a deeper theory.

And then SQPR would become a science (if all other testable predictions turn out to be in accord with it).

Elements of science have to be certain, within a particular context, or “universe” (in the logic sense of “universe”) which, itself, is part of the real world.

For example Quantum Field Theory makes probabilistic predictions which can boil down in very precise numbers which can be measured. Quantum Computers will also make probabilistic predictions (about the real world, even the world of numbers).

In the latter case, it’s just a guess. In other words, philosophy.

Those who claim science does not depend upon philosophy, just as those who claim philosophy does not depend upon science are, at best, trivially correct: they have got to be looking at small subfields of these activities, cleaning the corners.  

In the grand scheme of things, science and philosophy are roughly the same activity: twisting logic any which way, to get testable consequences. Thus discovering new logics on the way, not just new facts

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One may ask: why did philosophy and science get separated?

Because our masters, the plutocrats want to keep on ruling. That means they don’t want us to understand what they are doing. Thus, smarts are their enemy. Hence people have to be kept in little mental boxes, so stupid, just so.

This is nothing new. When Rome was at its apogee, very learned Greek slaves educated the youth of the elite. As they were slaves, they knew their place. This helps to explain why Rome stagnated intellectually, and thus was unable to solves its pressing strategic, technological, economic, health and ecological problems. Stupidly educated youth makes stupid, and obedient adults.  

Specialization is a way for plutocrats to keep on ruling. After all, to run a civilization, one needs special capabilities. The ultimate specialization is to pretend that certain knowledge, that is science, is independent from guessing new sure knowledge, that is, philosophy.

Actually the latter is intrinsically bad, since, if it was thoroughly applied, it would allow We The People to understand how plutocracy works. Thus philosophy was strongly encouraged to degenerate, by being cut from knowledge, be it sure, or historical, etc.

If society wants to survive, it will have to forge ahead in the way of understanding. Failing to comprehend or to implement this, has led many civilizations or states  to collapse (Maya, Sumer, Egypt, Abbasid Caliphate, Jin dynasty, Western Xia, the Dali Kingdom , Southern Song, Aztecs,.etc.).

Thus sustainable plutocracy is a balancing act between understanding and obedience. This time, though, understanding has to be maximized, be it only to solve the climate crisis (there are many other crises). Thus plutocracy has foster understanding (quite a bit as Jeff Bezos is doing with Amazon, hence his success)..

We may be unable to get rid of plutocracy, because We The Sheep People out there are so supine. The next best thing, which is also the necessary thing, is that it is in the interest of everybody to let philosophy roll, and thus get reacquainted with science. And reciprocally.

Patrice Ayme