Jonathan Lawhead

“ I shall argue that this is quite enough of a threat to warrant an all-out effort to solve this problem. I shall argue that philosophy, properly pursued, has as real a contribution to make as any other branch of science. I shall argue that we must, in a very real sense, cooperate or die. ”

“ What exactly is the domain of inquiry with which molecular biology is concerned? That is, how do molecular biologists carve up the world so that the patterns they identify hold of systems included in that carving? It is rather unusual (to put it mildly) for the creation of a domain in this sense to be a rapid, deliberate act on the part of working scientists. It is unusual, that is, for a group of people to sit down around a table (metaphorical or otherwise) , pick out a heretofore unexplored part of the world for empirical inquiry, and baptize a new special science to undertake that inquiry. ”

“ There’s a more important sense in which science is concerned with more than just the observed world, though: science is not just descriptive, but predictive too—good science ought to be able to make predictions, not just tell us the way the world is right now (or was in the past) . A science that consisted of enumerating all the facts about the world now, as useful as it might be, wouldn’t seem to count as a full-fledged science by today’s standard, nor would it seem to follow the tradition of historical science; successful or not, scientists since Aristotle (at least!) ”

“ Science grows up organically as it attempts to solve certain problems—to fill in certain gaps in our knowledge about how the world changes with time—and is almost never centrally planned or directed. Scientists do the best they can with the tools they have, though they constantly seek to improve those tools. The fact that we cannot give a principled answer to the question "what parts of the world does molecular biology study?" should be no bar to our taking the patterns identified by molecular biology seriously. ”

“ Superficially, we might accuse the spirit of Feynman of simply begging the question; after all, he's merely defined science in such a way that it includes (by definition!) any productive work done by philosophers of science. Given that definition, it is hardly surprising that he would consider philosophy of science qua philosophy of science useless—he's defined it as the set of all the work philosophers of science do that isn't useful! 'Philosophy of science is useless to scientists,' on that view, isn't a very interesting claim. ”

“ There are real conceptual problems at the heart of (say) quantum mechanics, and while the sort of scientifically-uninformed speculation that seems to have dominated Feynman's conception of philosophy is perhaps of little use to working scientists, the interdisciplinary turn in academia has begun to make it safe for the careful philosopher of science to swim along the lively reef of physical inquiry with the physicist, biologist, and chemist. Science is about collaboration, and there is room for many different contributions. No useful tool should be turned away. ”

“ It is not enough, then, to say that science is about prediction of how the world will change over time. Science doesn’t just seek to make any predictions, it seeks to make predictions of a particular sort—predictions with verifiable consequences—and it does this by attempting to pick out patterns that are in evidence in the world now, and projecting them toward the future. ”

“ If there's a more legitimate worry lurking behind the spirit of Feynman's critique, it's this: philosophers, on the whole, are not qualified to make pronouncements about the quality of scientific theories—they lack the training and knowledge to contribute non-trivially to any branch of the physical sciences, and while they might be well-equipped to answer evaluative questions, they ought to leave questions about the nature of the physical world to the experts. ”

“ We looked at a few problem cases in pattern identification—including patterns that hold only approximately, and data-sets with partial information loss—and argued that even in cases like that, useful information can be gleaned from a close search for patterns; patterns neither need to be universal nor perfect in order to be informative. We tried to give an intuitive picture of what we might mean when we say that science looks for patterns that can be projected to unobserved cases. ”

“ Philosophy too has been included in this interdisciplinary surge. The particular tools of the philosopher—the precise nature of which we shall examine in some detail in the coming sections—are well-suited to assist in the exploration of problems at the frontiers of human knowledge, and this has not gone unappreciated in the rest of the sciences. Gone are the days when most physicists shared the perspective apocryphally attributed to Richard Feynman, viz., "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." ”

“ It's all well and good for philosophers to claim to have something to add to science in general (and climate science in particular) , but what exactly are we supposed to be adding? What are the problems of science that philosophical training prepares its students to tackle? Why are those students uniquely prepared to tackle those questions? What is it about climate science specifically that calls out for philosophical work, and how does philosophy fit into the overall project of climate science? ”

“ The results that emerge are due to the action and work of the collective—to the institutional practices and structures that allow for this cooperative work—as much as to the work of individual scientists in the laboratories. Each branch supports all the others by working on more-or-less separable problems in pursuit of a common goal—a goal which no one branch is suited to tackle in isolation. In the case of elementary particle physics, that goal is (roughly) to understand patterns in the behavior of very, very small regions of the physical world ”

“ Feynman might well suggest that while it is true that genuine contributions to quantum mechanics (and science generally) have occasionally come from men and women employed by philosophy departments, those contributions have come about as a result of those men and women temporarily leaving the realm of philosophy and (at least for a time) doing science. ”

“ Patterns discovered in one branch of the scientific project might inform work in another branch, and (at least occasionally) entirely novel problems will precipitate a novel way of carving up the world, potentially facilitating the discovery of novel patterns; a new special science is born. ”

“ Whether or not the joke contains a kernel of truth (and whether or not it does indeed count as a black mark against the usefulness of the discipline) is not immediately important. This project is neither a work in philosophy as traditionally conceived, nor a work in science as traditionally conceived: it is, rather, a work on a particular problem. I’ll say a bit more about what that means below, but first let’s start with an anecdote as a way into the problem we’ll be tackling. ”

“ This putative pattern R is empirically adequate as a theory of how this sequence of numbers behaves; it fits all the data we have been given. How do we know if this is indeed a genuine pattern, though? Here’s an answer that should occur to us immediately: we can continue to watch how the sequence of numbers behaves, and see if our predictions bear out. If we’ve succeeded in identifying the pattern underlying the generation of these numbers, then we’ll be able to predict what we should see next: we should see a ‘zero’ followed by a 'one,’ and then another ‘zero,’ and so on. ”

“ This is a problem that is more urgent than any before it, and certainly more than any since the end of the nuclear tensions of the Cold War. While it likely does not, as some have claimed, threaten the survival of the human species itself—short of a catastrophic celestial collision, few things beyond humanity's own weapons of mass destruction can claim that level of danger—it threatens the lives of millions, perhaps even billions, of individual human beings (as well as the quality of life for millions more) , but only if we fail to understand the situation and act appropriately. ”

“ It's no criticism, in other words, to say that a putative pattern that we've identified relative to a particular carving of our subject-matter holds only for that carving; if our goal is just to make predictions about a restricted region of S, then identifying a pattern that holds only in that region might well make our jobs far easier, for it will give us license to (sensibly) ignore data from outside our restricted region, which might well make our task significantly easier [17] . ”

“ The sense of 'efficiency' here is a rather intuitive one: an encoding is more efficient just in case it is shorter than the verbatim bit map—just in case it requires fewer bits to transmit the same information. In the case of S1-2, it's pretty easy to see what this sort of encoding would look like—we specify R, then specify that the string we're passing consists in two iterations of R. Given a suitable way of encoding things, this will be much shorter than the verbatim bit map. ”

“ In virtue of knowing R, and by measuring the values in one sub-set of S3, he can make highly successful predictions about how other value measurements in the set will turn out. The fact that he will also get things wrong occasionally should not be too troubling; while he’d certainly want to work to identify the exceptions to R—the places in the sequence where R doesn’t hold—just picking out R goes a very long way toward sustained predictive success. ”

“ From the perspective of cognitive psychology, the brain is an unanalyzed individual object—cognitive psychologists are primarily concerned with making measurements that let them discern patterns that become salient when particular chunks of the physical world (that is: brain-containing chunks) are taken to be individual objects. ”

“ We want to transmit the contents of S1-2 to a third party. However, suppose that (as is almost always the case) our transmission technology is imperfect—that we have reason to expect a certain degree of signal degradation or information loss in the course of the transmission. This is the case with all transmission protocols available to us; in the course of our transmission, it is virtually inevitable that a certain amount of noise (in the information-theoretic sense of the dual of signal) will be introduced in the course of our message traveling between us and our interlocutor. ”

“ If an observer is clever, then, he can use a series of measurements on part of his data-set to ground a guess about a pattern that holds in that data set, and then use that pattern to ground a guess about the values of unmeasured parts of the data set. ”

“ On the other hand, though, the intuition behind Feynman’s position is also surely mistaken; as I noted in Section 1.0, many of those same practicing physicists often acknowledge (for example) that people working in philosophy departments have made real contributions to the project of understanding quantum mechanics. It seems reasonable to suppose that those (living) scientists ought to be allowed to countermand Feynman who, great a physicist as he was, is not in a terribly good position to comment on the state of the discipline today ”

“ Research in quantum mechanics, to take one example on which my background allows me to speak at least semi-intelligently, might incorporate work from particle physicists doing empirical work with cloud chambers, high-energy particle physicists doing other empirical work with particle accelerators, and still other particle physicists investigating the mathematics behind spontaneous symmetry breaking. ”

“ Even if it were not, it isn't clear what it would add to our understand of either a particular science or of science as a whole: the patterns identified by molecular biology are no less important for our not knowing if they do or don't apply to things other than some of the systems on Earth in the last few billion years ”

“ From yet another perspective—that of, say, population genetics—neither of these systems might be taken to be an individual; while a population geneticist might well be interested in brain-containing systems, she will take something like alleles to be her primary objects, and will discern patterns in the evolution of systems from that perspective. ”

“ S3 is almost consistent with having been generated by R—only a single digit is off (the bolded zero ought to be a one if R is to hold) —but still, it seems clear that it is not an instance of the pattern. ”

“ The report describes the then-current state of interdisciplinary research in science and engineering:
Interdisciplinary thinking is rapidly becoming an integral feature of research as a result of four powerful “drivers”: the inherent complexity of nature and society, the desire to explore problems and questions that are not confined to a single discipline, the need to solve societal problems, and the power of new technologies. [4]
The times, in short, are a-changing ”