DANTE@EDWARDS-2060.ARPA (Mike Dante) (06/22/88)
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 88 13:20 EDT
From: Mike Dante <DANTE@EDWARDS-2060.ARPA>
Subject: Re: AIList Digest V7 #39
To: AIList@AI.AI.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Message from "AIList Moderator Nick Papadakis <AIList-REQUEST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>" of Mon 20 Jun 88 06:56:37-PDT
I can't resist replying to George McKee's insistence that "one description
of the collective experience of humanity ... outranks all the alternatives ...
(that is, the ) primacy of scientific physical reality". The statement is of
course true only if you exclude from the "collective experience of humanity"
all of history, aesthetics, human relationships, and self understanding. But
I think you must also exclude George's own belief that we are only a
"quantitative step away" from "telling us what we need to know." This non-
scientific belief was held by Marx, Freud, etc., etc., all of whom wished to
believe that the crystal purity and certainty of the scientific method had
solved mankind's ills. It seems to me that the evidence necessary to support
this belief would be at least some demonstrated success that we were some sort
of "quantitative step away" from having any idea how to close prisons and mental
hospitals, and abolish greed, fear, and war. So far I see no scientific
evidence that we have more than a laundry list of things to try, and a much
longer list of things that have been tried and have failed. To extrapolate
from the limited (though exciting and important) successes of the scientific
method in these fields to an assertion that we are only quantitatively distant
from describing "the collective experience of humanity" seems to me a great
deal less justified than the belief that was expressed by the Dean of American
Science in the 19th Century, that all of Physics had been learned and all that
was left was quantitative improvements.
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