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“Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Science, the Scientific Method, Abstraction, and Prediction in an emergent complex Material World - Part 1
Aristotle, the Father of Science, recognised the high dimensional complexity of our Material World and its entanglement.
In his attempt to make sense of the Natural World, Aristotle developed a Theory of Causality.
A search to understand various natural phenomena by asking the question - Why?
Uncovering good explanations where knowledge of a thing requires an understanding of its cause.
It culminated in a pluralist Theory of Causality and a category of Four Causes, including a. a Materialist Cause (emergence out of which), b. a Formal Cause (the form), c. an Efficient Cause (the primary cause of change or rest) and d. a Final Cause (telos).
These foundational principles formed the basis of the Science of Nature.
In our attempts to make sense of Nature, Aristotle saw the Four Causes as ever-present in natural phenomena that we perceived and experienced.
In essence, Science was concerned with natural bodies that were subject to change - systems of change - a process Philosophy.
Aristotle's multidimensional approach to causality also extended to how he perceived Biology.
An ontological anti-reductionist who saw living evolving systems beyond the mechanistic prism of pre-socratic materialists.
[https://philpapers.org/archive/NICITC.pdf]
Is the cell really a machine? [LINK]
A perspective highly relevant to today’s Modern Society and the Cartesian reductionist mechanistic World View that had become endemic.
Ontological Philosophical Errors that shaped our response to the Pandemic and have resulted in a Modern Society increasingly viewing the Material World, Mind, and Body as Mechanical Machines - Refer to Edition No: 2 and Edition No: 3.
A renewal of Aristotle’s perspectives about Nature in the 21st Century
The Philosophy of Science in the early part of the 21st Century had begun to increasingly question this Cartesian reductionist worldview and the core axioms - reductionism, determinism & cause-effect - that goes to the very essence of Modernity.
The Philosophy of Cartesianism, Modernity and its application to Modern Science was being challenged.
Was causation even Scientific?
Was Science objective?
Were the properties of matter within the bounds of a mechanical philosophy?
“In some, or all of these respects, most modern philosophers have been, in effect, Cartesians. Now without wishing to return to scholasticism, it seems to me that modern science and modern logic require us to stand upon a very different platform from this”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Science, Prediction, Uncertainty and Complexity
The origins of Aristotle’s Science of Nature were grounded in understanding the causes of the changes in our ever-changing Natural World.
It was high-dimensional (i.e. Four Causes) and was about good explanation.
By the 16th Century, these Aristotelean ideas about nature, combined with the propositional Term Logic (Aristotle’s Metaphysics), the emergence of mathematics and empirical observation, and new technologies (e.g. telescope), had been transformed into a modern-day form of Science that had significant utility.
Practical application on how we create (Hegel’s Second Nature), control (refer to Heidegger), and shape the World.
Certain patterns of nature could now be abstracted, mathematically codified and then used to predict and manipulate the Natural World.
“Within a Metaphysics of quality, Science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this Reality, but the patterns are not the Reality they describe”…
— Robert Pirsig
To do this, certain conditions for these propositional claims needed to be articulated and grounded in a new Model of the World (a new World View).
GliderMaven, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The Philosophy of Cartesianism and Modern Science
“The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once”…
— Rene Descartes
The Philosophy of Cartesianism provided the answer and pathway forward.
— It was a belief system based on the veracity of the human mind and thought (a Primacy of Human Consciousness), which was seen to provide rigour and robustness to making sense of Reality - “I think, there I am”… - Descartes.
— It brought coherence by reducing the complexity of the Material World via abstraction and reductionism (i.e. simplicity when there was complexity, certainty when there was emergence, discrete when there was entanglement, and ergodicity when there was non-ergodicity.
— It integrated empirical observation with abstraction & codification. Abstract propositional claims (e.g. Theories & Heuristics and Algorithms) could be tested against the Material World's observed patterns.
— It formed a view that the Material World was predictable (supported by various empirical observations) - The emergence of a new World View akin to a Mechanical or Statistical Machine or Clock or Computer.
— It was able to abstract Material World patterns and sensory phenomena via symbols & signs - Semantic Languages of abstraction - Mathematics, data & information.
— It embraced new physical semantic tools of abstraction (calculators, computers, etc.) and new semantic languages of abstraction ( term logic, mathematics, computer languages) to extend the frontiers of predictive complexity.
— It embraced new somatosensory tools for observation to extend the reach of the human senses beyond the body (e.g. telescopes, microscopes, mobile phones etc.).
— It provided a clear set of foundational coherent ontological axioms - reductionism, determinism & cause-effect - to explain the Material World (i.e. unlike Aristotle’s anti-reductionist ontological perspective of Biology and Nature).
— The Observer formed a hypothesis with a set of conditional (axioms) and a set of propositions (predictive claims about a future state) that could be tested against what was being “Observed in the World” (an early type of Semiotics).
It was an extension of the Metaphysics conceptual frameworks that formed the basis of Aristotle’s Term Logic, briefly discussed in Edition No: 2.
Rather than make statements of ontological existence as they relate to today, the abstraction via mathematics enabled the propositional claims to be extended into the future - predictive tools of semantic abstraction.
But what type of propositional ontological claims relating to our Complex World could be predicted?
Predictive Propositional Claims - Classical (Discrete) Low-Dimensional Stable Static Patterns independent of the Observer
When thinking about the nature of reality, one can categorically reduce one’s experience of Reality into 4 Categories of Existence that combine the Observer with the Observed.
…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know, we don’t know.”
– Donald Rumsfeld, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense 2002
Looking at Reality through the prism of knowledge - knowing- where one’s Mind is, say, S and the World experienced is P, the categories of existence for such propositional claims would be:
— All S are P - Known (Mind) Knowns (World)
— Some S are P - Known (Mind) Unknowns (World)
—Some S are not P - Unknown (Mind) Knowns (World)
—No S are not P - Unknown (Mind ) Unknown (World)
Given the Observer and Observed are entangled (i.e. the actions & thoughts of the Agent are entangled with the World), then what propositional claims are possible that generate new objective Scientific Knowledge?
If Aristotle saw the Natural World as - natural bodies that are subject to change (i.e. processes of transformation) - what type of objective, propositional claims could be derived from stable patterns independent of the observer?
Aristotle envisaged the Scientific Method could only be applied to Natural Phenomena (Natural Laws) that “cannot be other than they are”.
![Twitter avatar for @metastabilian](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/metastabilian.jpg)
Science is possible if and only if there are knowable objects and the aim of scientific knowledge is revealing universal and necessary truths— A-type Propositions (SaP) that are Universal and Affirmative.
“Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems”…
— Heinz von Foerster
By asking the question — Why? about natural phenomena, a causal search for understanding natural processes of change could be explored.
Why does the earth orbit the sun?
Why do objects fall to earth?
Why does a river flow more and more easily over time?
![Twitter avatar for @Sara_Imari](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/Sara_Imari.jpg)
Questions that arose out of A-Type (SaP) Propositional Category - stable Patterns of Nature that were independent of the Observer (a Noumenon World) — that eventually led to Scientific breakthroughs such as Newton’s Laws of Motion, Laws of Gravitation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Constructal Law.
“There is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced on him by the natural world. They are the expression of a natural world order”…
— Max Planck
Aristotle saw the Scientific Method being applied to these laws of nature:
the Scientific Method provided a framework to explore answers to questions of Why? that arise out of A-Type (SaP) Propositional Category — stable Patterns of Nature;
A Noumenon World where events were independent of Humans; and
Where Nature’s “demonstration” or proof becomes the final determinant for these Scientific Ground Truths.
This breakthrough provided forms of reductionist abstractions that resulted in new Theories, Heuristics and Algorithms that could not only attempt to bring coherence and provide good explanations of natural phenomena - processes of change - but could also provide some predictions about the future.
New predictive powers that would literally change the World and structure of Society — the dawn of Modernism, an elite Scientific Clerisy and Technocracy.
To be Continued …
But could these Propositional Claims be extended beyond Classical Binary Propositional Claims (All S are P or No S are P) — high levels of certainty — into a World of uncertainty and interdependencies?
A World of complexity.
A World where Some S are P and Some S are not P.
A World of Randomness and Interdependencies.
How far could a priori logical abstraction - timeless and consistent - such as mathematics and computation - be extended into a posteriori experienced emergent non-ergodic Material World?
A messy, complex world (a continuum) of embodied (Observer & Observed) interactions where context mattered and an ever-changing fitness landscape confronted those making such predictions.
![Twitter avatar for @CSPeirceSpeaks](https://substackcdn.com/image/twitter_name/w_96/CSPeirceSpeaks.jpg)
“This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative.” …
― Stuart A. Kauffman
The Semantic Abstraction of our Material World...
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