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Science is ethics or "electics"

A new metafysics and model of reality synthesising the deterministic & statistical world-views.




The clockwork universe and the sub-lunary world.


Karl Popper prefaces The Open Society and its Enemies with a great democratic and scientific quote from Edmund Burke, to the effect that no legislator was ever too clever to benefit from the amending criticisms of the least regarded of his colleags.

It's fairly well covered that science is a democratic enterprise. HG Wells did start not only the Sankey declaration of Human Rights in 1940. He followed it with a Charter of Scientific Fellowship, which recognises, in a simple constitution of the profession, its democratic and progressive nature

Lee Smolin points out the similarlity of science with democracy, in The trouble With Physics (which I reviewed).

It's one thing to see scientists working democraticly together. It's another to express a new electoral or liberating world-view, which is the destination of this discourse.

The ancient world-view of Aristotle was scientific in spirit, in that it was based on an observation of two apparently different kinds of reality. Everything on earth seemed to be subject to decay and change. This was designated the sublunary world, because everything, in the heavens, from the Moon outwards seemed to revolve in an unchanging order.

CS Lewis recalled this out-look, in The Discarded Image.

James Michener, in Space, remarks that every human-inhabited continent but Europe left observation of the twelfth century nova, whose remains lie at the heart of the crab nebula. The Chinese, with their charming Confucian courtesy, called it a guest star.
This concept would have conflicted with European scholars heaven-earth dualism of perfect and immutable versus tempory and changable. That may be why the nova was never recorded in Europe, because it couldnt have happened, according to their current conceptions.

Of course, trying to find facts that contradict existing theories, to shake them up and improve them, is basic to modern science. I dont know, tho, that we are any less prone to rigidity of mind, ignoring and down-right rejecting new ideas that break with convention.

It was not til snubbed and intimidated pioneers like Galileo started looking thru telescopes that similarities, like the mountains of the moon, between the heavenly and earthly worlds became apparent.

We now know that the clockwork universe was well and truly originated by the ancient Greeks. The wonderful mechanical working system that predicted the orbits of the planets, based on a geocentric planetarium, salvaged by Jacques Cousteau, from a wreck in the Mediterranean, research traced to Syracuse, and presumably the workshop of Archimedes.

This literally was a model of the known heavens. The model may be used as a metafor (metaphor), when the whole universe is thought to be rather like the model, in some points of comparison, without being the same thing.
And the clockwork model becomes metafysics (metaphysics), when the universe is actually thought to run like clockwork, as in the filosofy (philosophy) of the mechanical universe.

The Renaissance and the Newtonian universe were only a much belated revival of mechanical determinism, as a metafysics or metafor or model for the construction of creation.
R'it (Right) into our own times, when I was a student nearly half a century ago, our social science course discussed whether this natural science of universal laws, science par excellence, as it was conceived, could ever be discovered for a science of society.

We were aware that society defied scientific prediction, like Aristotles sublunary world, full of fysical (physical) corruption and change.
Not to mention the cynicism of the innocents, half awake to, and half in denial of, the moral corruption of power politics.

In practice, sociologists were reconciled to the study of statistics to find approximate regularities in human behavior.

Influenced by Ernest Nagel, in The Structure Of Science, which was already out-dated when it came out in 1960, I was lagging in the modern conception of natural science, whereby the statistical explanation of quantum physics are the more general and exact explanation than the clockwork model of supposedly exactly determined motions.

The seal of this, on the public mind, was made quite recently, when Stephen Hawking asserted that God does play dice, in contradiction to a famous belief of Einstein.
(Ive not simplified the spelling of Stephen to Steven, because that's a name. In speling physics with an f, I'm only following a European practise.)

For Isaac Newton, it has been observed, God was like a constitutional monarch, who set the wheels of creation in motion, letting them run on in their determined course.


Statistics from convenient approximation to reality description.

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Nineteenth-century thermodynamics determined that the wheels would run down. In practical terms, this meant that there was no perpetual motion machine with complete efficiency in converting energy to work.
The random molecular motion of heat energy always dissipated and it was apprehended that the integral machine of the universe was similarly fated to a heat-death, in the extreme long-term, in which there were no more concentrations of energy, such as life itself manifests, to be harnessed.

Thermodynamics could only measure molecular motion statistically in the mass. But it was still assumed that all the individual molecules hit each other as deterministically as balls on a billiard table.

In 1900, Max Planck introduced the quantum, as a concept to mathematicly explain black-body radiation. He didnt actually believe in its reality.
In 1905, Albert Einstein used the l'it (light) quantum or foton (photon) to explain the foto-electric effect. Instead of explaining the different wavelengths of l'it as waves, he explained them as low to h'i (high) energy fotons. Many low energy fotons could not knock the electrons out of the atoms of a metal but even a few h'i energy fotons could.

Einstein broke with Planck as to the fysical (physical) reality of his quantum concept. Quanta are real, the h'i energy quanta are energetic enuf (enough) to knock electrons out of atoms.

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford proposed a planetary model of the atom, with a nucleus like the sun, orbited by electrons like the planets. This was still in terms of Newton prediction of individual motions of heavenly bodies. But, as with black body radiation, classical calculations did not fit observations.

Instead, Neils Bohr model of the atom predicted statistical probabilities of the electrons positions, at increased or decreased energy levels, from absorbing or emitting a foton or light quantum of given energy. These light quanta are discreet energy packets and the energy levels of the electrons are subject to discreet moves of position, the so-called quantum jumps.

Whatever the magnitude of quantum energy, it was always a multiple of an irreducible minimum quantity, the quantum.

Quantum fysics (physics) broke with the classical conception of continuously observable and predictable motion.
Here, Bohr broke with Einstein, who still believed mechanical determinism the more basic kind of explanation than statistical determinism.

The view of Bohr and later quantum fysicists prevailed. Statistics in fysics had moved from being a convenient approximation, used in thermodynamics, to an essential description of the fenomena (phenomena) in subatomic fysics.

The existence of irreducible quantum fluctuations of energy meant there was no absolute zero of temperature, no absolute "heat death" because of energy coming in these minimal packets or quanta.

Consequently, the classical empty vacuum of space becomes a "sea" of virtual energy, transitorily creating particles and anti-particles, which yet conservatively add up to zero. And the magnitude of this spontaneous, probabilistic energy creation, only obeying energy conservation, on a scale of borrowed time, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

There are many much better explanations of modern physics, by those qualified to give them. But that may just about do to give a vague and hopefully not too misleading impression of how the metafysics of fysics has changed from that of God the law-giver to God the gambler! or God the chance-taker. It is as if the constitutional law of the universe had passed over to the random selection of legislators!

It is perhaps a sign of the times that some political reformers, increasingly seriously, speak of extending random jury selection to random legislature selection. This, after all, assumes a gamble on the quality of your law-making is probably better than the determined selection of representatives.

However, this gamble over-looks that transferable voting is the essential scientific theory and method of elections.

C S Lewis says the idea of a natural law actually comes from the law that society makes to keep itself in order. Natural law is a metafor of the universe as a well governed society. Taken seriously as such, natural law is a metafysics.
The word comes from Aristotle. Metafysics literally means his book after the fysics.

The conclusion seems to have been jumped-to, that because metafysics is not the reality of fysics but an after-thought to reality, it is therefore irrelevant. Hence, the move by David Hume to have metafysics consigned to the flames.
But that is rather like abolishing dress because it hides nakedness.

Hume abolishing metafysics is rather like abolishing theater, because it is only make-believe. The puritans did abolish the theater, and pure science may be not so far removed from puritanism.


Electics of science.

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This page suggests a new metafysics and model for science. It isnt trying to introduce metafysics into science, because metafysics has always been there.

The ins'it (insight) for this initiative came from one of my simpler discoveries about election method, which I later realised combined previous metafysics or models of determinism and chance. The study of election method, the realisation of many peoples choices in representation is, in effect, a science of ethics. Ethics wouldnt be a problem if there were no social conflicts from our individual choices.

That one ins'it by itself wouldnt have amounted to much. It was backed by a lifetimes successive finding that all the branches of the sciences, that I touched upon, have an electoral interpretation. This is reviewed in my memoir and survey of this site, Getting ideas...; also on the page: A measure of evolution...

Hence, my new metafysics and model suggests science is ethics or "electics."

This consistent finding of electoral perspectives on the sciences is why I call this approach a model. By model, I mean an example, that may be followed in future researches, because it has held in previous investigations.

A metafysics may be likened to a dress upon reality, rather than reality itself. Its value depends not on it being reality but on how good a fit to reality it is or how suitable it is; how well it wears in all circumstances. In this respect, a good metafysics becomes a model, in the sense of a practical program directing research more fruitfully.

A metafysics may say we live in an elective, literally a "choosing-out" or a moral universe. There is good reason to think so, since a universe, meaning the whole, must be, by definition, self-determining and free of other influence.
However, reason alone is not enuf (enough). Does the program or model, the metafysics engenders, illuminate all areas of scientific experience?

Since filosofers have spoken of God as law-giver or even as chance-taker, the previous paragraf reminds of the Buddhist notion of Godhead as Liberation. I m'it (might) also mention Liberation theology, but admit to knowing little about either.

The sense I am using the words metafysics and model comes close to the standard scientific distinction between theory and experiment or practical test. But the latter terms usually apply to precise specialist work in a given science. The former terms are what the jargon of scientific method calls a "heuristic" or loosely useful approach before, hopefully, getting down to brass tacks.


The Droop quota as a (statistical) tie-break quota.

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Previous web page (Equilibrium STV and critique of social choice theory) touched on the old filosofical wrangle between determinism and free will. At this point, it is convenient to intrude a refinement on my advocacy of harmonic mean (HM) quota for a proportional election count.

The reason is that HM quota, as an average of the Hare and Droop quotas, supplies a practical basis for balancing determinism and chance, so that choice is not unduly swayed by either.

While I would hesitate to build a filosofy on this ins'it (insight), it provides that basis in evidence of a working relationship, upon which science depends to progress beyond foggy disputes about the direction to take.

When candidates get equal votes, or tie, there has to be a tie-break, for instance when two candidates each get 50 out of 100 votes seeking one seat. Or when three candidates get 33 out of 99 votes, seeking two seats, there is a tie to be broken by chance means such as drawing the short straw.

These examples are the minimum votes required for election as specified by the Droop quota: votes/(seats + 1).

A tie-break is a chance settlement of an election that could not be decided by combined choice.

When I describe the Droop quota as a tie-break quota, statistically speaking, for want of a better description, I mean that it allows election of candidates that may not be prefered at a statistical level of significance. In other words, the Droop quota allows elections in which chance fluctuations may decide the outcome.

Even tho the result may not be an exact equality of votes between candidates, from a statistical point of view, it might just as well be. Hence, the characterisation of the Droop quota as a (statistical) tie-break quota.

Some happier term may be forthcoming, but that is an attempt to capture the gist of a democratic inadequacy in the Droop quota.

That is not to say the Droop quota may not be needed, and obviously much more often than an exact tie-break. Nevertheless that is its essential function statistically speaking. In other words, the Droop quota is not an ideally democratic quota.

The opposite fault characterises the Hare quota, or votes divided by seats: (votes)/(seats) or v/s. For a candidate to monopolise all 100 votes out of 100 would be improbable or even for two candidates to duopolise 75 votes each out of 150 votes.

That is to say, the Hare quota implies some suspension of individual choice for a power by one or a few to determine group choice.
(It brings to mind Joe Chamberlain of the Birmingham caucus, marshalling supporters votes to take all the Birmingham seats.)

As Ive suggested before, the two contrary influences, in the Hare and Droop quotas, both to the detriment of democratic elections, can be neutralised by taking their average. The suitable average for a harmonic series, in terms of votes per seat, is the harmonic mean. What I call the simple harmonic mean quota is: votes/(seats + 1/2).

This is no mere idle theoretical consideration. The argument against STV not being proportional enuf falls down when the HM quota is used. And the notion of a completely proportional system is delusive from a democratic point of view.


Statistical corollary of mathematical proof as objective election.

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I first suggested, that mathematical proof could be characterised as an objective election, in my survey of this site: "Getting ideas..." New ideas pop up when they will, so that idea was incorporated in the description of the site rather than among its contents.

I dont want to burden the site description page with any more content and this page is a convenient place to mention a corollary of that conjecture of mine. Another page (Equilibrium STV) is a critique of social choice theory of the logic of elections, by applying Arrow theorem, which owes something to Godel theorem critique of theoretical logic, whose ideal involves mathematical precision.

The corollary is this: If mathematical proof is objective election, since elections are essentially statistical, then mathematical proof must also be essentially statistical.

But this goes against the traditional raison d'etre of mathematical proof, namely that it, of all sciences, was the one to produce certain truths.

In statistics, certainty exists only as a polar extreme of relationship, given a value of unity or perfect correlation. At the other extreme is zero correlation or no relation at all.
Mathematical proof, unlike statistics is only concerned with logical certainty, that is absolute certainty.

Whereas statistics may deal with chance correlations which are spurious certainties. All swans are white - until you get to the Australian variety of black swans.

Even logical certainty only holds good or is as certain as the assumptions on which it rests. But Euclid proofs are not like white swans of geometry until black swans of curvilinear geometry appeared, because Euclid proofs still certainly follow, tho only within the restricted limits of strait-line (straight-line) geometry.

Statistically counted certainties may or may not involve generally holding logical relationships, as well as chance correlations.

My invention of Binomial STV generalises from traditional STV, which could be called uninomial, counting only positive preference order and not also its reverse.

The binomial distribution approaches the normal distribution for large samples counted. This is a random distribution, occuring so often in collections of data, that it appropriated the title, normal.

Simon Singh discusses, in his book, Fermat's Last Theorem, how some mathematicians have become disturbed by computer proofs. These may use genetic algorithms, which work by random changes to programs. Those mutations most successful in getting a result are allowed to reproduce themselves with further mutations, in a natural selection of programs until one is found that solves the problem.

This is not mathematics traditional logically determined route of proof but statistics random arrival, like wandering unknowingly to a destination without making a map, but doing so by benefit of a super-fast vehicle (the computer) crazily going every which way, too speedily to observe its routes and discriminate which were redundant or not.

In the four-color problem, all the logical possibilities of combination were so great that only a computer could check them all, to show that only four colors were needed to distinguish separate areas. Many mathematical problems are of this nature. And so are many elections.

Traditional STV is routinely dismissed as complicated. Meek method is already strictly a computer count. Binomial STV hints that is scarcely the beginning of the complexities of a scientific election count.

Meek method is a computer counting of voters preferences too exhaustive to be done by a hand count. This is comparable to the exhaustive computer count of the alternative mapping possibilities to be found in the four-color problem.

What Ive described as Equilibrium STV or real-time Hill PR is more akin to genetic algorithms. This is not merely a systematic covering of all known possibilities. It allows for unknown possibilities to arise in the voter interactions as they assess each others behavior in forming queues behind rival candidates.

The rules are implicit and fluid. As new patterns of voter intentions emerge, new rules may be formulated to characterise them. These may be new wave patterns, new oscillations, new disturbances in the voters approach to election equilibrium.

This is a mathematical form, which, far from falling a victim to Godel incompleteness theorem, assumes, from the start, incompleteness of known rules governing behavior.

This then is a key idea, that relatively unco-ordinated behavior may generate new forms of co-ordinated activity. More or less random movements may throw-up new patterns of conduct. That is towards some goal, under not too rigid means of determining it.

A good analogy is the debate on a universal language. On BBC radio, a member of a party list to the European Union, a descendant of the Hapsburg dynasty dismissed English as not a language at all. What he meant was it was just a rabble of words from every which language.

That's a top-down or dynastic perspective, if ever there was one. The classical ideal of a pure language, like ancient Greek or Latin is only possible because they are dead languages. English is open to foreign words because it is open to foreign experiences. In that openess, it is a progressive, democratic and scientific language. It is a growing evolving language, capable of growing out of itself into something else almost as unrecognisable as a butterfly to its grub. The classicists prefer to stick with the grub.

It is true that English empiricism, so lacking in continental classicism, could learn from their rationalism, without the top-down dogmatism. For instance, English speling needs to be simplified with a rationalised Roman alfabet, that wont create unnecessary dificulties for users of other European languages also based on the Roman alfabet.

From long experience, I know what a thicket of inconsistencies obstruct English learners, and the pit-falls speling reformers routinely fall into. But effective reform is practical.

As Einstein said, empirical rationalism is the essence of science. That is deducing and testing the consequences of principles established on a sound basis of evidence.
The trouble with politics is that it has not learned this basic lesson of science. Instead, politics rests on deference to dogmas of party interests, which are defended, at all costs, regardless of the evidence, against the public interest.

A case in point is (oligarchic) British governments fanatical adherence to planetary life-threatening nuclear weapons replacement and its hyper-polluting spin-off and accessory of (uranium fission) nuclear power.

Empiricism relies on finding things out by chance with little if any guiding principle. This is likely to lead to many trivial experiments that lead nowhere. Half a century ago, that summed-up an American text-book of social psychology, that was on our course.

Even with the advent of computers to enormously increase the checking powers of investigators, it may be doubted whether the question solved with the help of computers was productive of further interesting areas of study and discovery. This is precisely the doubt expressed by mathematicians (quoted by Simon Singh) over the solution of the four-color problem:

But when I received the answer, 'They did it by breaking it down into thousands of cases, and then running them all on the computer, one after the other', I felt disheartened. My reaction was, 'So, it just goes to show, it wasn't a good problem after all.'

However, rationalism deduces consequences of basic assumptions. In practise, our assumptions may be tenacious beliefs, just because they are assumptions, meaning that we have never questioned them.
A basic tenet of scientific method is that believing a thing to be true, however strongly held the belief, doesnt necessarily make it so. It still has to be checked by the evidence for its truth or not.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that profound discoveries may come by chance finds, that long m'it (might) have been over-looked by the scientific community.
Alice Stewart found a completely unexpected correlation between cancers in the unborn and x-ray scans of their pregnant mothers. That the medical professions favorite toy of the time was a killer was not looked-for or welcome news.

Alternatively, scientists may be moved by strong intuitions of important new discoveries shunned by their contemporaries. This was somewhat the case with Alice Stewart, having first discovered, by chance, a danger in low-level radioactivity.

Whereas the US government was moved by strong convictions that the truth m'it not be to their liking. They desperately tried to prevent her repeating any discovery of harmful low-level radioactivity to workers in nuclear power stations.

Before microscopic evidence of infection was available, the conviction of Semmelweiss of the need for hygiene, to lower the mortality rates in hospitals was a thankless task. His controled experiments were sound scientific procedure but not in themselves proof by explained cause of the results. And this left a loop-hole for a lamentable disbelief and disregard of circumstantial evidence.

That lesson seems to be lost on the British government whose dogma of out-sourcing, despite its poor hygiene record, does not allow hospitals to clean themselves (and despite the vote of the Royal College of Nursing, and except in devolved Scotland since 2008).

In summary, mathematical proof appears to have become not merely rigorous but a composite or dynamic of the rigid and the random, like a true form of election or system of choice is a steering between determinism and randomness. This appears to be widely the case in the sciences, as well as maths.


Harmonic mean quota as ethical model of science synthesising the deterministic & statistical world-views.

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About a century or more ago, scientific filosofers like Bertrand Russell were laying the foundations of mathematics in logic. Russell paradox of classes was an early hiccup in that program. Godel theorem of incompleteness, of theoretical deduction, followed from studying Principia Mathematica, by Russell and Whitehead. Following on from that, Arrow theorem led to the social choice theorists critique of election method deficiencies.

The deterministic world view of Newton Physics inspired Russell to name his work on foundation mathematics, after Newtons great work. This determinism was also idealised by Einstein but successfully contested in his debates with the likes of Neils Bohr, who, with Einstein himself, pioneered statistical predictions of sub-atomic behavior.

Einstein didnt believe God plays dice. Stephen Hawking said God does.

My apologies again for this crude and cryptic recapitulation of classical and modern models of science.
It m'it be apparent from some of my own web pages on electoral method, such as my innovation of a Binomial STV, that, like fysics, elections are basicly statistical.

The virtue of a filosofical appreciation, of the assumptions behind proportional representation, using my other innovation of Harmonic Mean quota, is that it relates in a very simple and precise mathematical way how determinism (represented by the Hare quota) and chance (represented by the Droop quota) can be neutralised by statistical averaging to produce or liberate choice.

The implications of this are, firstly, that the new and old models of science both have a legitimate role, because they complement each other. But that legitimacy depends on the purpose for which they complement each other, which is to liberate choice.

In short, a more complete combined model of science serves freedom of choice.

Know the truth and it will make you free. This post-modern science is profesied (prophesied) by ancient religion, as of the Gospels, if not originally by them. (You dont have to be a fundamentalist or bibliolater to appreciate early human wisdom.)

Science is truly ethical. This goes against the widespread academic dogma, stuck in the dualism of facts and values, asserted by David Hume.

When he was young, Noam Chomsky said he could hardly deliver a talk across his country, without someone asking: Is that a fact or a value?
He answered, in effect, as Wells had long before, namely that values are facts. Wells followed Kantian answer to Hume, that there is no sharp division between the natural sciences and what Kant called the moral sciences, usually called social science.

My tutor, an impressively read young lecturer was good enuf to admit, he hadnt known of Wells essay: The so-called science of sociology.

I remember this tutor repeating to me Hume slogan that you cannot derive an "ot" ("ought") from an "is." "You really can't" he added, as if I needed specially convincing.

That seemed a straw man argument even then. In the light of the subject of this page, I would respond (after less than half a century delay) that deriving an "ot" from an "is" would be treating ethics, as if it could be determined. But ethics, by definition is not deterministic; it is (freedom of) choice.

(As my experience confirmed, English education is dogged by this dualism between humanities and science. C P Snow called it "the two cultures" believing it to be a cause of bad government. Typicly, no scientists in the British Cabinet, for instance.)

The point about the Harmonic Mean quota is that it gives an example of how choice emerges from a balance between determinism and chance. Therefore, choice doesnt come from determinism alone, as Hume refuted; nor does it come from chance alone.

Scientific method relies not only on the classic logical determinism but on chance evolution, as pioneered by Charles Darwin. Just as deterministic mechanics was used as a model for aspirants to other sciences, so the stochastic theory of Natural Selection has been adapted to other sciences. (I surveyed some of these on a web page.)

Not only body but mind also is subject to effects of random sensory stimulations on memory. And this is where we come to this curious limitation of memory formation thru reinforced response to more favorable of chance conditionings. The baby says ma-ma and mother picks it up and hugs it, til the baby learns that calling the sounds, ma-ma, will bring its mother.

Yet, language appears to depend not altogether on rewarding chance noises but on an inherited sense of grammar that falls into abeyance if not picked up in the company of human speech. This led to the structural linguistics of Chomsky. (I know he thought English orthography almost perfect. But we dont have to agree with him about everything.)

The learning of grammar seems to be like imprinting. It takes effect only if it takes place at a fixed time in a creatures life cycle, as with chicks imprinting the first seen image, normally the mother bird, as who to follow for sustainance after birth.

Children, especially open to social influence while not strong enuf to do heavy work, seem to have become instinctivly programmed to speech instructions. If they are left in the wild, they become the fabled wild boy who has missed the childhood chance forever to learn speech structure.

Language structure or grammar is the prototype of the logical system of classical science. It is of recent provenance in human evolution. Mathematics is its advance guard, not yet well established in most peoples minds. And perhaps not taut (taught) well widely.

There are people, who used to be called computers, in effect human calculating machines. Studies have been conducted on what algorithms their brains are using, of which they themselves are completely unconscious. The operation is too fast for observation, perhaps rather as a bubble bursts too quickly for the eye to see.
Human computers are a rare minority. Likewise, the lyre bird is not typical even of birds, in its capacity for perfect imitation of sounds, however unnatural.

This instinctive recording and replaying seems to have its basis in fysical properties of lifeless materials. I remember my surprise long ago I could hear my typewriter start clacking when I was not typing. i had just put the fire on and this heated iron bars, guarding the fire, which energised the vibrations that had passed thru the bars when I was typing.

Heat is random vibrations but it amplified a recognisable pattern of vibrations.

One can guess from the evolution of computers how brains, like bodies, have gained some degree of specialised or structured function. The weaving loom with its cards for different weaving patterns is the prototype of the computer hardware with different programs (the software) installed.

Even so, computer models of the brain include unspecialised neural networks, which are mapped thru weighting configurations, according to patterns of behavior.
Studies have shown that most people are good at guessing approximations to the numbers in a group, rather than the exact number.

Even mathematics, the stronghold of certain proof, has had to cede results to the natural selection principle by encouraging the fittest of computer program random mutations, in arriving at results.

Mathematics, at least, felt it had to be consciously aware of each step of the way it took to ensure a proof was absolutely true. Now this is no longer true. The four-color problem was solved by working out more combinations than unaided human endeavor could ever hope to verify.

There is something of a double standard in decrying the unconscious manipulations of machines. Humans may be conscious but are also fallible. I suppose, the feeling is that people can be conscious of errors, unlike machines. But people also lapse into relatively mindless habit, in routine or protracted checking.

And consciousness may not guarantee correctness, even from the properly qualified. In this respect, a properly qualified man is similar to a properly qualified or programed machine. Some mathematicians have claimed that computers can be unreliable because full of bugs. Machines like men may not be always reliable. That is all that criticism amounts to.

Correct procedure may be distinct from more or less awareness of the fact. In that respect, the use of a human instead of a mechanical checker is not essential and mostly not even possible, nowadays.

This consideration brings to mind the mistake that believing a thing to be true makes it true. Human checking a computer calculation doesnt make it any the more true. The contrary is the case. You would trust an electronic calculator much sooner than yourself to do sums, tho it may be good mental exercise. Within its existing capabilities, the machine is generally much more efficient than the man. That is the point of machines. And why we fear they may replace us.

To further sum-up, the drift of human knowledge appears to indicate that the sciences are all of a piece. Mathematics is no longer quite the bastion of certainty and sure-fire rigor, it was once thot (thought) to be. Whether or no, the queen of the sciences, mathematics is like the rest of the sciences in being a play or dialog between order and disorder.

This structural play goes r'it (right) thru the subject matter of the sciences and may be the genesis of ethics in the natural world.

How that play or dialog is followed, more or less rigorously or randomly, may be defined as choice, the balance of the steering between the two extremes of law and lawlessness, or the rule book and personal initiative, or principled decisions and intuitive motivations, or analytic thot and holistic comprehension.

Thus, choice itself ranges from extremes of objective choice to subjective choice, according to the nature of the information before the choosers, whether well defined or vaguely dependent on the sum and balance of feeling experience.

Mathematics, in particular, has increasingly become reconciled to the instrumental value of indeterminate means of arriving at determinate results. But maths still seeks results, which are of the nature of objective elections, or choices made that everyone can agree are proven true on the basis of an election (including exclusion) procedure.
This is reminiscent of quota-preferential elections being true to the widely accepted logic of (four) scales of (scientific) measurement. (As explained on my page: Scientific method of elections.)

Is art representation?

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I admit that this scheme or paradigm cannot itself afford a comprehensive picture of human experience. Science and ethics cover only thinking and doing, and not feeling, the third part of a trinity of life. Aristotle defined these categories as the true, the good and the beautiful. So what of beauty, the subject of esthetics?

Following Benedetto Croce, RG Collingwood, in Principles Of Art, characterised art in terms of a language of imaginative expression. He rejected the notion of art as representation. With the advent of the camera, there was not the demand for painters to do realistic representations, that left exact memories of individuals in portraits.

In that narrow sense, art was no longer representation.

Herbert Read pointed out that abstract art, in its colors and shapes, still expresses feelings and actions, action painting no less.

Lurid colors and primitive images may forcefully represent shocking emotions. They may go below the rationally perceived out-lines of surface reality and still represent some deeper unconscious reality. Or indeed, art may remove itself from mundane objects to give a sense of spiritual realities not otherwise easily conveyed or represented.

This appears to be the secret of ancient cave art, as described by Nigel Spivey, in How Art Made The World. Such art may or may not represent mundane reality but it is representing altered states of consciousness.

I'm not going to try to do justice to Pitirim Sorokin on how the arts have reflected the changing nature of civilisations perceptions of reality. Over the centuries, the focus changes, say, from heaven and hell to earth - or heaven and hell on earth.

Painting and music have gone thru phases religious and mundane of subjects. I don't think Sorokin was convinced that painting becoming more abstract again in the early 20th century was more than a deceptive blip in the trend from spiritual to mundane.
And I'm not sure that he would have recognised the value, in its own r'it, of representational tone painting, such as the magnificent heavy-duty railway engine journey, Pacific 231 by Arthur Honegger.

Trains seem to have been a sort of secular religion of awe for Honneger, like child train-spotters perhaps.

Not to mention Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles. Their producer George Martin got the effect of the analog fone lines, Lennon endorsed (if not later) and as I am old enuf to testify. When I was a young child with excellent hearing, walking alone on a quiet country lane, I tried to decifer the weird burblings in the over-head wires.
I hope readers of this page have more success.

I admit my argument shows a somewhat disordered falling away from systematic treatment. And does not pretend to be other than incomplete. The page is a rather untidy tidying-up of my studies.

However, art remains representational, even tho it may change to, and from, representing realities of which we are less aware. One could characterise the whole of life in thinking, feeling and doing, as representation. This concept still retains a relation to science as ethics or electics, or a democraticly electoral interpretation of knowledge. That is art as representation has a relation to my metafysics of reality as representative of choice.

I guess the greatest achievement of social science was that Pitirim Sorokin (the most cited sociologist) recognised, from comprehensive historical research, (especialy in his masterpiece, Social and Cultural Dynamics) that civilizations need to integrate religious and secular values, rather than dismiss religion as a primitive social fase (phase), if they are not to destabilise, swinging from one extreme to the other, in the way they hold things sacred and profane.
This comes out, with respect to contemporary values, in The Sensate Culture by Harold O J Brown, a theologians study of Sorokins work.

One mundane but definitive means of this social stabilisation can be found in the truly democratic J S Mill and H G Wells tradition of peace-making power sharing, based on Carl Andrae and Thomas Hare independent discovery of proportional representation by transferable voting.

Note on a few candidate panlogs

Any word chosen as a panlog or universal term is going to have a history of usage, which associates it more with one of the three basic categories than the other two. Representation is most closely associated with democratic action.

An alternative panlog, coming from an artistic background, might be the word, imagination, or perhaps: symbolism. The image represents or is the symbol of reality. So, the representative is the symbol of the people, in the sphere of action. And in the sphere of intellect, science is the formulation of abstract symbols representing reality.

A further alternative panlog, maybe coming from a scientific background, might be the word, information. Science becomes a hierarchy or pyramid of knowledge that researchers climb, from the basis of experience, in the hope of reaching ever more concise formulation of information towards its pinnacle of first principles.

Information is also the function of the democratic representative, who is supposed to inform himself and others thru debates and investigative committees in Parliament.

And information is also the function of the arts, albeit a personal disclosure of individual states of mind, intent and feeling, that does not lay claim to universal truths or generalities or precise probabilities sot (sought) in the sciences.

Other related candidate words might be: form and measurement. "Science is measurement." Measurement represents observations. The logic of measurement is the key to the logic of elections.

Architectural proportions satisfying the golden mean are found from classical times.

People were tested by having them compare the abstract paintings of Mondrian, shown anonymously, with arbitrarily proportioned alternatives. Those of Mondrian were judged the better formed.
Mathematical intuitions of form underly esthetic values.

Foot-note on panlogs:

One could invent a new word, like the word, panlog, and define it as the universal word, equally applicable, or neutral, to the three basic categories of thinking doing and feeling. But that approach in itself would betray an intellectual predisposition.

Not that that is wrong, as long as one understands what one is doing.

Similarly, an artistic predisposition might seek to portray the basic categories, in a sort of trinitarian mandala, reminiscent of illustrations found in C G Jung books on the psychology of alchemy.

A spiritual exercise of Vedanta induces trances by repeating the "language Brahman," the sound AUM, usually spelt OM and signifying the complete range of fonemes (phonemes) to human speech, a single fonemic representation of the whole of language, repeated til it resounds thru the universe of consciousness.

The language Brahman m'it (might) be considered esthetic version of the panlog.




Speling note: out of the technical limitations of the age of the moon borderland cosmos.

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This page uses the apostrofe to mark a missing vowel in a dipthong. Hence, light as l'it, which has fonetic rendering as: lait. Hence, high as h'i, or indeed, the colloquial speling, hi.

In how we maintain our language, we are still technologicly in the age when the Aristotle moon borderland cosmos remained the intellectual reality of European man.

In this respect, the apostrofe is even more useful for replacing the technical anachronism resorted-to by the first English printer. William Caxton used the most common letter type he possessed, e, as an accent to distinguish five dipthongs from the five vowels. This confuses the vowel e, with an accent e, which is not a foneme (phoneme) at all.

Hence we all follow the Caxton printing press limitation, technicly out-dated by more than half a millenium, in distinguishing, for example, the words: mad and made.

The apostrofe could replace altogether the accent use of e. Hence: made becomes ma'd. This is foneticly the same word as: maid. But the alternate ways, of speling ma'd and maid, preserves their separate meanings.


Conclusion: liberation science (science as liberation) in the equilibrium evolution of nature.

(4/09/2014.)
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While absent, our lecturers put us sixties students on a three day course in computers. We were told of a new science called systems analysis. When I came across a book with this title, I found out it was about the background mathematics for computer scientists, namely things like symbolic logic and statistics.

This subject was really more akin to scientific method or rather scientific technique, more than scientific theory. When I think of systems, I think more of scientific theories. To me, systems science would be a study of the array of theories in the sciences and their structural similarities.

In this latter context, I briefly consider the place of electoral science in relation to the established sciences.

My most basic consideration of democratic method was in terms of scientific method. Good election method is like a good scientific test or experiment. And the single transferable vote was found to satisfy the criteria of a good scientific theory.

I also compared scientific method of elections, as I conceived it, with the leading theories of the sciences, whether they be relativity or the periodic table or evolution and ecology.

That is to say election method, involving properly constructed thought for a valid scientific theory, was akin to the nature of scientific theories in general. Indeed, as knowledge and freedom depend upon each other, a scientific theory seemed also, at least implicitly, an election method.

All that was fair enough. I've gone over it many times, and don't wish to repeat it here. I now want to take this outlook a step further.
Without fully realising it, my essay on Physics and Politics may have been a first naive exploration (and also my last) of a new stage of understanding the place of election studies in the sciences, and more generally of science in relation to ethics and religion.

I touched upon different election quotas, giving different proportions of representation, as more or less stable outcomes of different electoral situations. This compares to a chemical element, like water, having different states of equilibrium: ice, water, steam.

Cosmology also has adopted such thinking in terms of transitional states in the evolution of the universe. The four known forces of nature were thought to have been one from an original condensed cosmic fireball that proliferated the forces in a cooling expansion.

I feel like someone who has the key to a cupboard full of jumble, that he cannot open lest it tumble all over him. He is too old to put it all back again in good order.

Nevertheless, a pattern emerges in the panorama of sciences as studies of more or less independent states within the independent state of the universe itself. By the same token, the universe may be just one more or less independent state of the multi-verse.

When I left college, I had something of an emotional relapse, I suppose, from the lack of intellectually stimulating company, as well as not having learned how to love, while youth was still on my side.

In my twenties I read the gospels and was struck by the prevalence of superstition, that Jesus the liberator of love defied, and the persecution this brought upon him. Then I considered the history of so-called Christianity, in terms of its persecutions and superstitions.

This led me to a simple theory of emotional imbalance or instability that hadnt sufficiently learned how to co-exist in stably loving relations. Societies, like individuals could be mentally ill in violent swings between hateful oppression and fearful depression. Unstable individuals are themselves liable to be destabilising of others. There is an emotional domino effect on society.

Other unstable pairs of traits like avarice and sloth are also profoundly demoralising of social cohesion.

CG Jung taught the importance of emotional equilibrium. For example, foregoing too much egoism or self-praise could prevent an "inflation" or swelled head, as its commonly known.

His psychology is of a lifetime attainment of equilibrium of the personality.

When young, to make ones way in the world, one has to lead with ones strong suit, to establish a place for oneself in a competitive society. When one gets older, one wants to make up for the other undeveloped aspects of ones personality, to become a more complete human being.

This is what Jung called the integration of the personality. He took the idea of homeostasis in physiology and pointed out its psychological equivalent. It's essentially the idea of learning to regulate emotional swings back and forth, back and forth.
Jung tau(gh)t integrating, in one person, all the makings of several lives, that may be regretably neglected or conflict, into a harmonious community of selves that makes for a fulfilled and interesting individual.

Just as balanced equilibrium is the core of Jung psychology, so it is of Pitirim Sorokin sociology. He believes that for the society to have a lasting stability, it must integrate sacred and secular values, lest society become hopelessly unbalanced in one direction or the other, ultimately driving it to a revolutionary collapse in favor of an opposite extreme.

By learning to become dynamically stable but adaptive, or in dynamic equilibrium, the individual and society are liberating themselves.

Thus, science becomes an understanding of liberation as thru the evolution of equilibrium states, in ecology and even cosmology. I should say it is no different in intent from what might be considered a scientific philosophy of liberation in a religion like, say, Buddhism.

This then, on retiring age, is my (sketchy) conclusion as to the nature of science and its proper role in civilisation.
I have attempted a unitary filosofy, imperfect but not dogmatic, muddled but suggestive.

I am reminded of EF Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful. To show that economics is a moral science, he rather playfully posits a Buddhist economics, based on different principles to Western capitalism. Gandhi economics were a foremost influence on him.

Jung and Sorokin were among the great reconcilers of a mature conception of science with religion of love (such as defined by CS Lewis in The Four Loves).

Love is the answer. Love is the question. And that makes it a question of science. Sorokin appreciated this.
In qualification, I would say that continental thinkers generally have over-looked the practical application of liberation to society in the representative democracy advocated by John Stuart Mill and those especially English-speaking peoples in that constitutional tradition of ensuring fair play in society, like the regretably abolished Fairness doctrine in the USA.

Fair play is required in the political arena, just as in a private legal case, including scientific evidence free from prejudice and contempt of due process.
This is a huge problem for society as a whole even survival itself.

We know much of the answers that would make the world a better place to live in. We can improve our understanding of what needs to be done, reducing or even marginalising governmental parasitism. But ultimately, the very condition of freedom itself ensures that humanity cannot altogether eliminate the possibility that people will make disasterous choices.
Mankind can improve its chances, tho.


Richard Lung
July 2014
5/09/2014.



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