(Nov 11, 2017 09:02 PM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]ANSWER: Scientific theories are mental constructs that have objective reality as their content.
Ok.
Quote:According to the scientific method, science puts objective content first, letting theories be determined by observation.
Ok. (I'm skeptical about the so-called 'scientific method', but that's a quibble at this point.)
Quote:But the phrase "a theory of reality" contains two key nouns, theory and reality, and science is really about both.
I notice that where the sentences above were about "scientific theories", now the topic seems to have shifted to "a theory of reality". That may or may not indicate a shift over to broader metaphysics.
But sure. Every description of objective reality, scientific or not, involves the extra-linguistic object whose accurate description is the point of the whole exercise, along with the conceptual vocabulary in which the description is stated. I'm not convinced that examining the conceptual vocabulary is really part of the content of science though. That's more the province of the philosophy of science I guess. The history of science is typically the area of scholarship that's most interested in tracing the historical development of the conceptual apparatus.
Quote:Because all theories have certain necessary logical properties that are abstract and mathematical, and therefore independent of observation
They do? What 'necessary logical properties' are those? I don't think that science, or human understanding in general, should be collapsed together with theoretical physics which indeed is hugely mathematical. I don't think that most thinking in biology is 'abstract and mathematical'.
Quote:- it is these very properties that let us recognize and understand our world in conceptual terms - we could just as well start with these properties and see what they might tell us about objective reality. Just as scientific observation makes demands on theories, the logic of theories makes demands on scientific observation, and these demands tell us in a general way what we may observe about the universe.
I'm not convinced that scientific theories all have a single logical structure. There probably are 'logics of theories' (where 'logic' is being used in a vague and informal sense) but it's plural. Science understands its natural world material in multiple ways.
But yes, I agree that attending to the kind of features that the theories address does tell us something about how reality presumably needs to be, so that the theories can be true. (That's the point of Quine's theory of ontological commitment, I think.)
How must reality be so that a theory like quantum mechanics can be true of it? That's the origin of the problems of "interpreting" quantum mechanics.
Quote:In other words, a comprehensive theory of reality is not just about observation, but about theories and their logical requirements.
Ok, I agree. I don't want to push that idea too hard though. Our ordinary language and the language of science are generally about the objects of propositions. Geology is about rocks and landforms, it isn't about the concepts 'rock' and 'landforms'. If we start focusing on the conceptual apparatus, it becomes a much more philosophical 'meta-science' sort of thing. Most scientists (along with most people in everyday life) aren't comfortable or happy doing that and resist it. It's why they bleat, "That's just semantics!"
But sure, epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of science obviously arise and are relevant to understanding whatever it is that science is doing. It's why philosophers of science pay so much attention to things like modeling.
It's also why the revolutions in physics of the early twentieth century
were revolutions. They forced scientists to re-address seemingly settled parts of the classical conceptual vocabulary like the nature of 'simultaneity', the standing of determinism, or wave-particle duality.
Quote:Since theories are mental constructs, and mental means "of the mind", this can be rephrased as follows: mind and reality are linked in mutual dependence at the most basic level of understanding.
I'm sure they are, 'at the level of understanding'.
Quote:This linkage of mind and reality is what a TOE (Theory of Everything) is really about.
That seems to be redefining it a bit. In physics a 'theory of everything' is "is a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe." (from Wikipedia).
Langan seems to be using 'theory of everything' to mean something like 'all encompassing epistemological-metaphysical system' that conflates everything that can be known with everything that is.
Quote:The CTMU is such a theory; instead of being a mathematical description of specific observations (like all established scientific theories), it is a "metatheory" about the general relationship between theories and observations…i.e., about science or knowledge itself. Thus, it can credibly lay claim to the title of TOE.
Assuming that CTMU has content and that it is true. That still needs explication and argument.
The most obvious problem that I see at this point is that Langan seems to be quietly and implicitly collapsing together (mathematized) scientific theories with the more psychological/epistemological question of what can be known, and both of those seem to be further conflated with the ontological scope of reality itself.
Quote:Mind and reality - the abstract and the concrete, the subjective and the objective, the internal and the external - are linked together in a certain way and this linkage is the real substance of "reality theory".
Kant already beat Langan to that project. Except that even Kant admitted that the limits of human cognition aren't necessarily the limits of reality itself, hence his 'noumenon'.
Quote:Just as scientific observation determines theories, the logical requirements of theories to some extent determine scientific observation.
At least they partially determine what we are prepared to recognize and how we describe and conceptualize it.
Quote:Since reality always has the ability to surprise us, the task of scientific observation can never be completed with absolute certainty, and this means that a comprehensive theory of reality cannot be based on scientific observation alone. Instead, it must be based on the process of making scientific observations in general, and this process is based on the relationship of mind and reality. So the CTMU is essentially a theory of the relationship between mind and reality.
I sense Langan is starting to go off the rails here.
Quote:In explaining this relationship, the CTMU shows that reality possesses a complex property akin to self-awareness.
"CTMU shows"?? That's just an assertion of what's supposed to be a grand metaphysical truth. It doesn't follow from the proceeding discussion at all.
Certainly given that human beings are self-aware and that they are certifiably real, reality obviously includes self-awareness among its many contents and potentialities. But that doesn't begin to suggest that reality as a whole is self-aware.
Quote:That is, just as the mind is real, reality is in some respects like a mind. But when we attempt to answer the obvious question "whose mind?", the answer turns out to be a mathematical and scientific definition of God.
We've just made a huge leap there, from describing the intellectual context of "the CTMU" in the text I've already quoted up above, to
assuming the conclusions of the CTMU.
The obvious question isn't "whose mind?", the obvious question is 'Why should anyone believe these grandiose crypto-theological metaphysical speculations in the first place?'
Quote:This implies that we all exist in what can be called "the Mind of God", and that our individual minds are parts of God's Mind. They are not as powerful as God's Mind, for they are only parts thereof; yet, they are directly connected to the greatest source of knowledge and power that exists. This connection of our minds to the Mind of God, which is like the connection of parts to a whole, is what we sometimes call the soul or spirit, and it is the most crucial and essential part of being human.
Except that there isn't any implication there. The whole thing is a non-sequitur.
Quote:Thus, the attempt to formulate a comprehensive theory of reality, the CTMU, finally leads to spiritual understanding, producing a basis for the unification of science and theology. The traditional Cartesian divider between body and mind, science and spirituality, is penetrated by logical reasoning of a higher order than ordinary scientific reasoning, but no less scientific than any other kind of mathematical truth. Accordingly, it serves as the long-awaited gateway between science and humanism, a bridge of reason over what has long seemed an impassable gulf.
That sounds like rank bullshit to me.