Science in a Box Commentary
By Jason Watkins
The original document titled 'Science In A Box' can be found here.
Comments
1.) Science is an endevor/behavior/system/whatever of human thought. As such, it's limits are inheireted from this. But this raises something ugly... it's a self deterministic mechanism. Current scientific theory influences it's further developement. You can solve this easyily if you view the universe as a static, predetermined 4 dimensional realm that we expierence with a rather predicitible progression forward in time. I don't think that's an adiquate answer though.. I'll come back to this.
2.) In the case of the system within a system arguement, there would be no way to _prove_ that you knew the true limits/nature of the system, even with God's "developer notes." This is what I would call infinte doubt. The sytems creates a new meta logic where it doubts it's previous logic.. in doing this, it inevitably has created a new system to doubt by forming a meta logic.. and so on. Basically, this all falls away into meaninglessness babel. A. If you think for a moment, you realize that all linguistic analysis falls prey to this flaw. We have a vocabulary and syntax that is attached to memories of the past. We can generate proofs inside this sytax and vocab. but we can never analyze the model itself from with the model. But, in this case we have an escape... linguistic thinking is not the only mode of human though. But, words are mere hot air in such areas, so I'll leave it be...
3.) My commentary which you are reading here has the possibility of affection it's own future form in my mind.. this gets really ugly and runs back into what I called a self determnistic mechanism earlier. Now.. if we throw out causality, we can dodge this. There is also another route. Let me define this problem a bit better with an example:
The following statement is false.
The preceeding statement is true.
These two statements are perfectly valid in our sytax/vocabulary/framework when viewed seperately.. but combined they prove a paradox. It is my personal hunch at the moment, that if we could generate a logic that accepted the above statements, as a single unit, in a meaningful manner; that we could escape most of the few criticisms of human thought I've lined out here. It seems that the author of Godel, Escher, Bach has hit in this same general area also.. so I look forward to the time I can complete that and perhaps offer something more meainingful.
In short, what I've said here is that in our univers, a system can be looped back into itself in such a way that it produces a paradox when viewed from either of the two states. Actually, give me a sec here, and I'll make the above true for even 1 state:
This sentance is false.
Hmm.. I think we just ran head on into Godel's incompleteness theorem.
Sorry all I can offer is more questions, not answers.
