Take it on faith: A cease-and-desist letter to those who only believe in measurements
Faith is a firm belief in something for which there is no proof (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faith). Faith is often considered to be distinct from and even contrary to science. I argue science is based on faith. Specifically, it is faith in the belief that measurements are always correct, and they alone can reveal the world around us. However, there is no evidence that this approach will always provide a correct and complete depiction of our environment.
I am not anti-science. In fact, I am all about science. I was a science major in college. I taught high school biology and chemistry. I employ science every day in my current career. I also use it to make decisions when it comes to audio, and I can point to a scientific basis behind my equipment decisions, speaker/listener locations and room treatment. I believe John Locke’s scientific method is a wonderful boon to mankind. But although data may rule my life, I know that science has its limitations.
The scientific method is an empirical approach and relies on our eight senses or extensions thereof to measure phenomena, enabling us to better understand and control our environment. People who embrace this approach believe if something cannot be measured, it cannot exist. They have total faith in this approach and deny the credibility of others whose senses do not or cannot yield something in units. In essence, these disciples take it on faith that measurements are the only true way to make sense of the world. However, we just may not have developed the instrument that enables us to measure the event. Early digital is a good example of our senses superseding the limitations of our understanding of the technology and hence, our measurements. Other examples of this include our past beliefs that we could destroy mass, that the earth is flat, and the universe is not expanding. And cables and amplifiers all sound the same.
Others find their senses can reveal events that are not apparent to some and may not even be measurable. Some people can smell faint odors or feel a slight breeze that others cannot. My wife can find a Petoskey stone on a beach out of thousands of rocks; I cannot see it even when I am standing over it. Different cables, fuses, amplifier topology, or cartridge design may or may not result in the same or even any data points and may or may not sound alike. But just because you cannot hear a difference nor measure a difference does not mean there is no difference. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, just as good sound may be in their ear.
Some of us have at least as much faith in our ears as we do in our REW software and associated hardware. I start room setup with acoustic theory and then confirm with measurements, but the final placement is always a result of what sounds most pleasing. I would not know how to determine speaker toe-in using a microphone.
While I will always have to trust my senses, I am not handicapped by relying solely on those that are associated with a number.
“…not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” William Bruce Cameron, 1963
"All that exist can be measured, it can be measured today or someday, If it cannot be measured in any way anytime it cannot ever exist." -- Anonymus objectivist
The problem is the rainbow exist but only for a subjective eyes/brain. The sound quality experience exist for subjective ears/brain... Even if they are never measured...What can be measured here, is not the colors experience or the sound quality experience as such but some of their correlative objective parameters.
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Gonna have to side with OP @tcutter on this one. If you guys are too short-sighted to see that science of yesterday was replaced with the science of today, you may want to look up the word humility in the dictionary. That's the best part about science. It can be replaced with something that proves it is outdated or incomplete. This isn't a fallacy. What the OP said is irrefutable in my eyes. That's not to say that current science hasn't given us most of what we enjoy as modern comforts today. Nor should we throw out the scientific method when it doesn't fit our preconceived notions. I think the subtle point here is, we need to be aware that science/measurements are still based on a humanized incomplete view on reality. And unless we understand the system as a whole, we must admit that our current understanding is just that. Current understanding. That's why it's called the "Theory of x" - because it's based on our current well researched understanding of things - not because it is irrefutable. |
It was Schopenhauer, not Heisenberg that wrote extensively about "world-as-appearance". Heisenberg's uncertainty is valid in the field it is in: Quantum Mechanics. He was not writing philosophy. He was attempting to describe a physical phenomenon. Otherwise, I agree with your viewpoint.
"But how do we know if that theoretical context itself is correct? After all, we have no "view from nowhere" to confirm that our theoretical schema actually carves reality at its joints. We can't step outside our conceptual frameworks to verify they correspond to reality-as-it-is-in-itself. Indeed, we learned from Heisenberg that those kinds of confirmations can't be done – we, the observer-participants, are part of the mix." |
Oh! OH! Oh! kavemaher...
You missed my point completely... You are like Hinton the Turing winner arguing that consciousness can be reduced to computations then consciousness is simply a "human construct" .... I am sorry but this " human construct" called "rainbow" is a phenomenon and as such is also meaning not only a physics description of "things" reducible to bits... Now to help you to understand the difference between meanings and bits :
« In Saving the Appearances, Owen Barfield uses the rainbow to illustrate his concept of "collective representation," arguing that a real rainbow is not just a subjective experience but a shared phenomenon that requires a collective observer. Unlike a private hallucination, a real rainbow is a collective representation that emerges from the cooperation of unperceived particles (like light and raindrops) and the conscious participation of observers, and for a phenomenon to be considered real, it must be capable of being shared... The rainbow does not "exist" in a meaningful way without an observer to perceive it. Barfield argues that the underlying reality—the light and raindrops photons and atoms —are what he calls "the unrepresented," which are not directly perceptible to the senses. The rainbow is the "appearance" that arises when consciousness participates with these particles. » In a word if the prime numbers can exist without any observer except God ( i think so as Alain Connes and many Mathematicians) A rainbow do not exist without subjective observers... And consciousness is not a "thing" we can recreate with computations...
By the way Heisenberg wrote philosophy and spoke a lot about Goethe phenomenology ...Guess why ? And the first, before Schopenhauer, to treat extensively of the difference between appearance as phenomena and noumenon is Kant....
By the way if you want to understand what Goethe spoke about and why Heisenberg as well as Schrodinger estimated that he was one of the greatest thinker of Western civilization and a true scientist, read the book i quote above by a physicist : Henri Bortoft : "taking appearences seriously" ...
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