Fidelity of Theoretical Knowledge

Enrique December 18, 2019 at 01:46 1225 views 2 comments

What do sense organs perceive compared to what actually exists in the external environment? Is nature a matter/antimatter/dark matter fluxing that, because of the barely stabilizing effects of carbon scaffolding in membranes, basically the structural framework of organic bodies thinly threaded into existence, humans model as a very narrowed subset of the states adopted by even the most indisputably real, experimentally verifiable substances? Are atoms, photons, particles, mass, even solids, liquids and gases, essentially instinctive analogies with our own biological cellularity, conceptually embodied as a physical world in deeply erroneous ways? Is all of atomic theory besides carbon backbones and phospholipid bilayers an illusion based on what we reflexively and more or less arbitrarily pick out from and inject into a thus far inconceivable reality as relevant to our own bodies? How unrepresentative are our intuitions, theories and technologies? How deeply can basic orthodoxy in physics and chemistry be subjected to revision?

Comments (2)

Pantagruel December 18, 2019 at 13:28 #364243 0 likes

Interesting question. Popper's view on metaphysical realism is that we cannot derive a universal law from observations, however we can infer that there are universal laws. He further allows that, while many of the scientific theories we hold are undoubtedly going to be subject to future revision, he believes that there is some core set of theories which are accurate. However, it is not possible to know which ones those are.

SophistiCat December 18, 2019 at 17:11 #364305 0 likes

Quoting Enrique

Are atoms, photons, particles, mass, even solids, liquids and gases, essentially instinctive analogies with our own biological cellularity, conceptually embodied as a physical world in deeply erroneous ways?

Atomic theory in its recognizable form is pretty recent (I don't count ancient atomists who were speculating in a vacuum). It was shaped and critically investigated through a lot of empirical probing. There were other contenders that fell by the wayside in the process. So no, I don't think it's just an artifact of a prescientific archetype. That's not to say that it is unassailable, and already in more fundamental physical models those atoms and particles have dissolved into quantum fields.

Where we have an understandable blind spot is with weakly-interacting entities, such as hypothetical WIMPs. Possibly other things as well, which we can't easily capture with our instruments in Earth conditions. But with all the wild variety of theoretical models that we have developed in various areas, I don't think that there is much chance that we are missing something obvious that is right in front of us just because we are stuck in some erroneous conceptual pit. Whatever it is that we are missing, we are probably missing for good reason.