[Fis] _ Re: Fw: Five Momenta. Five Itineraries

[Stanley N Salthe]

Bruno, Joseph -- The unity of the sciences comes from the fact that one
understands sociality by way of biology, and one understands biology by way
of chemistry, and then one understands chemistry by way of physics. Thus,
the subsumptive hierarchy:

{physics {chemistry {biology {sociality}}}}

Comte, I think first showed us this.

STAN

On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 10:31 AM, Bruno Marchal <marchal at ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Dear Loet,
>
> Sorry for bumping this old post, but I cannot resist (I tried!) to add my
> grain of salt.
>
>
> On 21 Oct 2015, at 08:37, Loet Leydesdorff wrote:
>
> Self-reference is a key principle in art and humor and it may also be a
> key component of the structured coherence in science Pedro and we are
> seeking.
>
> Dear Joseph:
>
> Do not count me in to the “we”, please. In my opinion, these “unity of
> science” principles are outdated. At issue is to specify how the sciences
> and specialties are different; in which respects and why? Obviously, the
> boundaries are fuzzy, since what may seem far distanced from one
> perspective can be nearby from another (e.g. in terms of the metrics used
> for the measurement such as in the case of biometrics and econometrics).
>
> These distinctions are not to be identified into a single “self” of the
> self-reference, but to be dissolved (differentiated) in discourse. They are
> carried by the communication in science & technology studies or more
> broadly (since including the science/society interface) in the information
> sciences. The “self” is not transcendental to these discourses, but
> reflexive insofar as one has the communicative competencies to listen and –
> if so wished -- to participate.
>
> The distinctions (such as the ones between your five schemes) may be
> useful heuristics. The puzzles have then to be specified.
>
>
>
> I think that I might agree with Pedro and Joseph. The unity of science
> should be preserved, despite this is hard to do when specialities lost
> themselves in gigantic territories.
> This eventually made the search of unity in science into a "new' science,
> or perhaps, if we assume the conceptually strong hypothesis of Mechanism
> (Descartes/Turing) into the oldest of all sciences: theology.
>
> In that case we can define a straitforward notion of self: the
> representation of the body of the machine in its brain. Descartes sought
> fort his without finding it, and Hanz Driesch, with embryology in mind,
> pretended this could not exist, due to the apparent infinite looping most
> naïve attempts seem to lead to. But von Neuman, and more conceptually
> Stephen Kleene solved that problem. John Case solved the more complex
> embryological problem. The basic idea is contained in the Dx =>T(xx) trick:
> DD will give (=>) T(DD), that is the transformation T on itself.
>
> And I agree that there is nothing transcendental in that notion of self.
>
> But that notion is third person descriptible, which is not the case for
> the first person "I", which is the one who know, notably when it has some
> headache, plain or some pleasure.
>
> To get this one, Theatetus suggested to attach the "believer" ([]p) with
> "truth" (p), and we know today that such notion of truth, and thus of
> knowledge ([]p & p) is transcendental.
>
> It is transcendental in two sense: truth (even just the arithmetical
> truth) is not exhaustible.
> - It escape *all* semi-effective (proof-checkable) theories.
> - it is not nameable or definable by the machine (as Gödel and Tarski saw).
>
> But that transcendental aspect, which is forced by logic, is available by
> the machine. So a universal machine can know that she is universal, and
> that makes her know that there is an unavoidable gap between its beliefs
> and truth, and that it can be used to explain why consciousness and
> knowledge seem so hard/impossible to define. In fact the theology of the
> machine introduces many nuance about that self: which correspond at
> different fields of research (p, the truth, []p, provability/believability,
> []p & p (knowledge, epistemology), []p & <>p (observability, as explained
> earlier or in my papers), and []p & <>t & p (sensibility, qualia).
>
> The unity here is given by a belief in Truth, the original main God of
> Plato/Parmenides/Plotinus. It is the truth we can search, and perhaps knows
> aspects on it, but never as such: doubt must remain for reason of
> self-consistency.
> With Mechanism, we can limit Truth to first order arithmetical truth, and
> all other notion (second order truth, analysis) can be put in the
> epistemology of the machine. Infinities only makes proof shorter.
>
> So, the unity of science is not a problem, if we come back to modesty in
> theology. The main formula from which all this can be derived is sometimes
> called the formula of modesty: []([]p -> p) -> []p (Löb formula), which is
> both akin to the view of the scientific attitude as essentially the
> doubting view (from Descartes to Popper) and to the religious attitude of
> staying humble in front of the Unknown. In that setting, the original sin
> is when we separate theology from science, and that is what threat the
> unity of science.
>
> I like to say that only bad faith fear reason, and only bad reasons fear
> faith. Faith is always faith in some form of unity or unification of
> knowledge.
>
> Best,
>
> Bruno
>
> PS I don't find the five scheme you mentioned. It would be nice to see if
> they are related to the five platonic hypostases, or the five first
> affirmative hypothesis of Parmenides, as those are related to the five
> nuances mentioned above of self-reference.
>
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