Dear Gary Bourque:

Thanks for the concise yet informative response. For one, you've helped me realize I need to clarify a few points. I'm not really asking about the nature of the sciences and what is or isn't science so much as I'm recognizing that it may be possible for methods in "field" commonly regarded to be pseudo-science to have merit for more general purposes thanks to a more general nature (e,g,, quantitative or methodological). Thus I am indeed referring to methodology and not "science", but I wouldn't call methodology simply a measurement system (backdoor or no). That's why I included the example I did: developing measures of complexity is of great use to multiple fields and an area of active research. If some mathematical argument for ID from such measures is in context without merit, this doesn't make it useless as a possible approach to complexity in general.

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Additional information about the thought processes I had when considering this question:

I also agree that regardless of our ability to formulate certain questions in ways that can be investigated empirically (i.e., scientifically) and regardless of whether some notion that HAS been so investigated and is widely regarded to be balderdash by virtually everybody in relevant fields, truth is truth. Einstein fought tooth and nail against what was in no small part his own brainchild: quantum mechanics. One moment we had Planck's advisor telling him not to go into physics because everything was pretty much discovered and Lord Kelvin's remark about the "last" two remaining problems, and then physics became "classical physics" and much of physics became irreducibly statistical. Also, the way in which this transition occurred was anything but straightforward: it essentially ended the notion that there was or could be The Scientific Method. It began with a decent amount of "hail Mary's", including Planck's constant (which wasn't exactly pulled out of thin air but was something of a last ditch attempt and a wild idea that happened to work). The only reason physicists accepted QM was because one set of experiments going back to Young clearly showed light was a wave and Einstein and others clearly showed it wasn't. Unlike within medicine, psychology, sociology, etc., where constructs often have no realization the way mass does (the entirety of psychiatry is based upon a diagnostic model built upon the classification of symptoms and despite substantial evidence of the degree to which these are arbitrary). Whatever it was that photons were, it was their simple nature and the simple nature of the contradictory experiments that forced physicists to concede their entire framework was fundamentally flawed, not the experiments. That realization and the subsequent loss of the 19th century idealist divide between hypothesis, experiment, and theory would be bad enough alone, but they were followed shortly after by the end of a dream dating back to Leibniz and expressed famously as one of THE goals for mathematicians in the 20th century to situate the "queen of the sciences" firmly in on an axiomatic foundation. Instead, Gödel proved it couldn't be done and today I'd guess that most people don't consider mathematics a science at all, let alone "the queen of sciences".

That same Hilbert was the one who suggested that Heisenberg, founder of "matrix mechanics", and Born reformulate Heisenberg's discovery in terms of differential equations. But 1) Heisenberg didn't know what matrices WERE (Born told him) and 2) both Heisenberg and Born were already sufficiently baffled by the appearance of matrices that they didn't listen, and thus we had to wait for Schrödinger's wave equation at a time when the physics community was going from "just about wrapped up" to "we're just beginning to develop a fundamentally different theory of nature that isn't physical and that renders Laplace's demon and the whole of 19th century positivism obsolete". It would have been a welcome step forward, Of course, the eventual formulation of the wavefunction just got us that much closer to one of the two most successful theories in science that are currently incompatible and the fact that QM deals with mathematical (not physical) systems means that current attempts to unify the two are often mathematical solutions that we accept or reject on ideological grounds without empirical support (the same formalisms that have proved so successful entail things that are prohibited because we want them to be via e.g., the no-signaling constraint to retain special relativity or simply by finding other solutions mathematically to rid ourselves of paradoxes such as CTCs with pencil and paper, not a lab).

Quine, Popper, Putnam, Kuhn, etc., brought together philosophy, logic, and history to reformulate and reflect upon the scientific endeavor. On the one end stood those like Feyerabend (who defends teaching creationism in school because he regards science as being equally well-founded/unfounded) and Foucault, while on the other those continuing in the footsteps of Einstein, Russell, Whitehead, & Hilbert in an attempt to regain something of 19th century positivism, determinism, logicism, etc. I stand where most do: somewhere in the middle. If I adopted a view like Feyerabend's I wouldn't be in research, but I see no point in gripping on to illusions of the nature of science in a world where I see bad practices standardized and conventionalized within mainstream sciences and the particle physicists telling us that the measurement problem is solved if we only posit infinitely many universes in which every possible outcome is realized.

If rampant misuse of statistics can plague so many fields, might not there be some researcher investigating the paranormal or whatever whose work in signal processing was intended to detect otherworldly phenomenon but which is actually a superior method for identifying noise in high-dimensional datasets? That's without mentioning the fortuitous nature of many a scientific advancement, such as the quasi-accidental discovery by Röntgen of an effect akin to that predicted decades ago, missed by Crooke and at least twice by Lenard only to be observed by Röntgen quite literally in part to the nature of sight (mixed with general good luck and good experimental practice).

The nature of science and what isn't science is not necessarily related to what has caused science to progress or be impeded. As such, can it not be that work outside of the sciences turn out to produce something of value when freed of context? I'm not suggesting that we "extend" the sciences to include the investigation of theories, phenomena, or properties that contradict what entire fields are built upon and are without empirical support, or even with demarcating what is and isn't science. I'm merely interested in whether it is possible to identify the same kinds of developments that occurred before there was science, occurred by accident, were intended to explain a phenomenon that didn't exist (aether, phlogiston, etc.) or solve a problem that couldn't be solved (like formal/mathematical logic was), and so on, but turned out invaluable to the scientific endeavor.

I think not. Scientists are always in contact with a cultural milieu and can draw inspiration from anything floating around in the zeitgeist. But creationism is not scientific inquiry and cannot contribute to science. Creationism will never escape its status of supernatural claptrap.

Dear Dr. Hoffman:

I didn't mean to suggest that creationism is in any way a scientific inquiry, and indeed used it because I believe it is neither a scientific field nor supportable by any field within the sciences if it is supportable at all (which, I must admit, I do not think it to be). However, there are many, many contributions to science that were not only completely distinct from scientific inquiry, but were accidents (x-rays, for example, were at least as much influenced by luck as by theory). The few academics who defend creationist/ID thought (and do so by divorcing their arguments from the sciences) offer nothing, in my opinion, that can contribute to biology or really most of any of the sciences, if they could at all. However, arguments that seek to prove that some creator/god/whatever must exist given the complexity of living systems, the improbability of the physical laws governing our universe, and so forth, must speak to mathematics and physics. This is not to say that such arguments do something other than detract from the sciences in their essence, but rather that it is possible for one to promote a conception of reality that lacks both theoretical and empirical support yet do so in ways that offer novel and useful methods, advancements, or other novelties. Much of modern probability and statistical theory, for example, resulted from debates about gambling/games, god, and philosophy rather than applied mathematics. It need not have, but whether by mere happenstance or other reason it did.

It is a historical fact that advancement in the sciences has at times been accidental, coincidental, byproducts of forgotten and abandoned theories, and other deviations from what we associate with scientific advancement (i.e., theoretical frameworks in which hypotheses are developed and tested in accordance with scientific rigor). Most technological advances occurred before the sciences (as they are understood today) existed. Clearly, we do no require the sciences for developments which turned out to be vital to the sciences. The question, then, is whether there is any way to identify contextually useless developments that free of context via some generalized formulation or similar reformulation can advance the sciences. That such developments have advanced the sciences is not in doubt. What, at least in my mind, is in doubt is whether there exists any means through which what has in the past consisted of luck, happenstance, or a combination of chance and the right situations might be made more formal. That is, knowing that advancements need not be obtained, developed, or motivated by or within the sciences, is it possible for those working within scientific frameworks to identify that which has, in the past, advanced the sciences despite existing outside of the scientific endeavor?

Dear Andrew,

Your question and views reminds me of the fertile ground of: alchemy and theology, upon which so much of the western approach to science derived from (often as a negative reaction to them). What I found particularly interesting was the revisionist views of such iconic figures as Isaac Newton- who some believe to be more of a pseudo-scientist (first link) than a hard scientist. At least when we consider the proportion of effort that he spent on these endeavors compared to his truly "scientific output".

We now dismiss the idea of "ether" (luminiferous Ether) as pseudo-science when a belief in it actually spawned a series of discoveries which ultimately led to the formalization of the theory of relativity- 3rd link (Einstein's lecture)

The direction can be reversed: from hard science to creationism, as is the well-known case with Blaise Pascal (I am crudely equating pietist to creationist)- 2nd link: Pensees Section 7

Furthermore taking a more apologetic view from religion to science and back again- seeing the two as both sides (two books written) to/on the same coin of truth.-4th link: Henry Drummond's treatise: Natural Law in the Spiritual World

Hence I believe maintaining a water-proof compartmentalization between science and creationism is a folly.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPRV1h3CGQk

http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/pensees/pensees-SECTION-7.html

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.html

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/drummond/natural_law.html

If all thoughts can be converted into series of neuronal electrochemical changes with deducible mathematical equations explaining them; may be we can be in a position to stop saying that any thought is 'futile' or without scientific basis. If simple reflexes are meant to some useful end, why would the body waste its energy inefficiently in generating unscientific thoughts with a very low degree of 'truth'? That would make the human brain a really inefficient machine. Maybe the subconscious mind knows much better.

Dear Ankur Shara:

I continue to hope (if for no other reason that the number of years I will have wasted if I am proven wrong) that we will indeed be able to explain all cognitive processes via neurophysiology. However, many of the advancements in fields in which this is a goal have contributed more by casting doubt, revealing uncertainties, and showing how far we are to what we believed to be almost accomplished ~50 years ago.

As for why the body would waste energy, there are both innumerable examples of this and of types that occur all the time. Our minds are not readily suited to internally implementing optimization or minimization, the best solution to the knack-sap or travelling salesmen algorithms,  or really at all oriented towards the discovery of truth. We've been on this planet for over 100,000 years, and only once did proto-science (natural philosophy) transform into modern science, and virtually all progress of note happened after modern humans had existed for tens of thousands of years. We have not evolved to be formal information processing systems. In fact, our unmatched cognitive capability come from abstracting away from the specific and haphazardly connecting such abstractions compared to e.g., the extremely precise, neat, and stable organization of computers.

I feel that when we are thinking; our thoughts actually build up gradually through a series of suppositions which may seem rather unrelated. Like I can relate this process to carving of a wax block into a shape and casting it into metal where no wax remains at the end, though the shape was first built in wax that is not present at the end. Similarly, we can't relate the first sentence to the second one until we read it as a whole. The problem is that in an ongoing thought process, we might not have reached a point where we know both the sentences so that we can say for sure that they are related or not. Similar with the schools of thought. We can't out rightly reject a school of thought only if some parameters have been proven wrong.

Further, if neurophysiology is not able to explain cognition, then that may be a death blow to whole of the physiological science, as we may have gotten seriously wrong somewhere; however that would not still prove that whole of neurophysiology is wrong. I hope I am able to communicate to you what I mean!