Living with Uncertainty
Science, because its technological results are so impressive, is perceived as dealing in certainties. Force does equal mass times acceleration and F=ma is an obviously useful formula. But really, all we've done is assign a name to a conceptual quantity we invented, namely "force", and then defined it in terms of other, measurable quantities. Even the quantities one thinks of as fundamental, like mass and acceleration, are really just conceptual comparisons against some imaginary object at rest or with zero mass.
Science as reductionism is the search for the fundamental quantities and relationships from which everything else can be measured. But it has been argued that all measurable quantities, from mass and charge, to space-time itself, are emergent properties which science can never adequately predict (see A Different Universe, by Robert Laughlin). The strength of the rational, scientific method, is that it pays close attention to reality and makes educated guesses about causes and effects. Science is a method for dealing with uncertainty, and its theories can be thought of as superstitions which are valid only as long as the results match the prediction. That's the key difference between progressive science, or humanism, and regressive science, or ideology; both are responses to uncertainty, but science (at its best) is driven by uncertainty and science (at its worst) shields us from it.
This, I think, is what John Ralston Saul means when he talks about the power of the uncertainties inherent in humanism and the weakness of the ready answers built into the structure of ideologies. Ideology, whether scientific, religious, economic or political, doesn't have a memory and, as a result, the ideologue is unlikely to modify his or her preconceptions when the predictions don't match the results.
Science as reductionism is the search for the fundamental quantities and relationships from which everything else can be measured. But it has been argued that all measurable quantities, from mass and charge, to space-time itself, are emergent properties which science can never adequately predict (see A Different Universe, by Robert Laughlin). The strength of the rational, scientific method, is that it pays close attention to reality and makes educated guesses about causes and effects. Science is a method for dealing with uncertainty, and its theories can be thought of as superstitions which are valid only as long as the results match the prediction. That's the key difference between progressive science, or humanism, and regressive science, or ideology; both are responses to uncertainty, but science (at its best) is driven by uncertainty and science (at its worst) shields us from it.
This, I think, is what John Ralston Saul means when he talks about the power of the uncertainties inherent in humanism and the weakness of the ready answers built into the structure of ideologies. Ideology, whether scientific, religious, economic or political, doesn't have a memory and, as a result, the ideologue is unlikely to modify his or her preconceptions when the predictions don't match the results.
Comments
1) Our intelligence is limited
2) The mathematics itself is INCOMPLETE or CONTRADDICTORY.
This last fact was demonstrated by GODEL and if we do not change methods to approximate the higly nonlinearities of the universe (the mathematics has the above mentioned problems) we will NEVER have success and there will alwyais be somebody that uses the Ideology to explain the unknown and deal with the uncertainty with the risk to move the umankind into a new dark era. We have been walking on the edge of the knife for a while...
We might all be satisfied that this degree of thoroughness and precision is impossible, but I (and perhaps Gödel) would say its inherently impossible, whereas a devout reductionist would say only that it is only practically impossible, that its only the practical impossibility of ever having a truly complete description of initial conditions that prevents us from knowing our fates. And thank God for that; life without uncertainty would be a life without free will, a life without curiosity, without discovery, without creativity.
So what drives us to know if, in removing all unknowns, life loses all meaning? I don’t say this to discourage scientific passion. Quite the opposite. I'm only asking that we reconsider our motivations. How we rationalize science sets it up in opposition to other paths to self-knowledge and understanding. By insisting that the universe can be reduced to a set of equations that potentially remove all uncertainty, science is reduced to ideology and is no better or worse than other ideologies with similar claims. It could just as easily be science as religion that precipitates our fall.