Empirical research is mainly based on observation and perception using brain structures and receptors that are individual-specific or species-specific. Different organisms do not perceive and measure physical phenomena in the same way. For instance, an ant and a human will perceive physical properties differently.
What are the implication for empirical scientific research? Is it biased because of perception constraints?
Dear Marcel,
Unlike in the case of the ant, I don't think our ability to observe the causal relational properties we call 'physical' is limited by our sense organs at all. We build all sorts of machines that will do the discriminating we cannot do with our senses alone. The limits of our observation, as for dark matter, are limits imposed by fundamental aspects of physics rather than ourselves. Deaf-blin people can get PhDs in physics and understand it just as well as you or I. The vast majority of our information now comes to us in the form of strings of binary signals down optical fibres or somesuch.
What I think may be a bigger issue is the limits our brains inpose on how we conceive these physical properties. WIthin philosophy there are two camps: those who conceive of the causal relational, or dispositional, properties studied by physics as being 'underpinned' by 'intrinsic properties' and those who see that as incoherent. Is 'mass' some intrinsic property that gives rise to inertial behaviour, or it just an instance of operation of inertial behaviour? It seems that either one or other, or both, of these two camps is 'limited' by their brain's inferential capacity and thereby unable to conceive physical properties appropriately. This is perhaps the central issue in philosophy and it is unclear that there is a 'comfortable' solution!
Dear Marcel,
Unlike in the case of the ant, I don't think our ability to observe the causal relational properties we call 'physical' is limited by our sense organs at all. We build all sorts of machines that will do the discriminating we cannot do with our senses alone. The limits of our observation, as for dark matter, are limits imposed by fundamental aspects of physics rather than ourselves. Deaf-blin people can get PhDs in physics and understand it just as well as you or I. The vast majority of our information now comes to us in the form of strings of binary signals down optical fibres or somesuch.
What I think may be a bigger issue is the limits our brains inpose on how we conceive these physical properties. WIthin philosophy there are two camps: those who conceive of the causal relational, or dispositional, properties studied by physics as being 'underpinned' by 'intrinsic properties' and those who see that as incoherent. Is 'mass' some intrinsic property that gives rise to inertial behaviour, or it just an instance of operation of inertial behaviour? It seems that either one or other, or both, of these two camps is 'limited' by their brain's inferential capacity and thereby unable to conceive physical properties appropriately. This is perhaps the central issue in philosophy and it is unclear that there is a 'comfortable' solution!
Dear Marcel,
The eyes are not important. A DSLR camera will do what a retina does and you can convert that to an intensity profile print out in Braille and a blind person can know as much from this as a sighted one. She will not get the visual qualia but they are just codes our brains use for displaying information. The 'physical properties' you want to study can be described in all sorts of different codes with no 'bias' to what is known.
To falsify a claim to know that one's twin brother is having a shower in Vladivostock 15,000 miles away all you need to do is call him up on the cellphone and ask. Establishing the truth or falsity of a piece of information about physical properties is just a matter of setting up a different route for being able to deduce it from observation.
As for physics or chemistry I want to agree completely with Jonathan statements. As nuclear physicist my personal receptors are without any importance. I used Jonathans "machines". If I can´t smell a chemical derivate, I use some detectors which can measure the chemical content. etc.
No constraints, just defects in the brain are or might be a problem.
Every animal, humans included, have develop organs of perception, through evolution, just to have perceptions to help them to survive. Its animal may have its own reality, which maximises the expectation to stay alive. By transferring this picture to an epistemological problem may not have a lot of meaning. For humans now there are other instruments to help him to objectify his observations. Note that in macroscopic bodies, the activity inside, e.g. electron movings etc. do not have any implication fro the body itself.
Dear All,
It is more than interesting at least theoretically what Jonathan wrote on the perception of deaf and blind people earned a PhD in physics. I have not read or heard about similar cases and I cannot assess whether suitable number of deaf or blind or deaf-blind scientists exist in order to make correctly such comparisons. I do not know really up to-date machines which are able to multiply and accurate our perception on physical properties but I have found during my not too long personnel and entomological experiences that perception of phenomena as well as the flow of information among all kinds of people is very hampered. I have experienced the same thing here at RG even among specialized brain workers. It seems that in spite of the very clearness of (collective?) scientific perception our relationship towards the world - which must have an essential connection with physical properties – is full with errors and bias. Thus, I feel (because I am not able to perceive objectively the real world) personally that mankind needs still more sophisticated machines and a change of thinking paradigm to have a better view on the world around us.
Regarding the ant, I am entomologist however – unfortunately – we have still quite an obscure picture on the perception of insects. I hope Marcel has much better information on that of the birds.
Dear Costas/Andras/All,
I agree that mankind does not have to understand or perceive every detail in nature to live and survive. The whole world might be defined as a complex automatized system of which a very small fraction will ultimately be perceived and exploited by each individual living being.
Songbirds (e.g. canaries) represent among the best biological models for the study of perception and learning. The problem with animals is that they cannot talk with the scientists to express or explain what the feel and perceive. And for those that talk or write about what they perceive, language is often not subtle enough (e.g. a perceived dream as a mental vision versus a perceived dream as a written published text will be quite different, I think).
I have notices throughout various posts that there is this problem going on, namely the discussion between (in terms of the philosophy of science) internalists and externalists. It is a big and serious discussion, indeed.
Once and again the subject arises and the arguments come and go - always re-phrased. Either as questions from ourselves, or else as answers and comments to posts by others.
Are we still giving enough space to any sort of encephalocentrism? Either in the form of human brain, or the animals' ?
Some of us have already taken a position vis-à-vis such a discussion. Re-reading the posts is enough to shed some lights about it.
In any case, it is true that the story of science is the endeavor through which we have been enlarging the understudying or perception of the universe departing from a human-like perspective to a larger and deeper approach.
In such a history modeling and simulation have become utmost relevant and useful tools and rods that have, as it happens, helped see the world in a larger and deeper scope.
Besides, psychiatry and literature - I think here of O. Sacks works - has provided valid arguments that go along my comments here.
Dear Marcel,
I am very puzzled now by what it is you actually want to ask. I worry that 'perceiving' is being used in different ways with no regard to what these different uses might be and what causal relations they might involve. We do not perceive a dream in the sense that we perceive a tree.
You say:
'But in case of scanners or other machines let say providing images or other traces of a tissue, the machines provide proxies of the tissue without having access to all physical aspects of the tissue. Are there machines that can measure all the physical properties of a tissue?'
What are 'images' here? The scanner is not providing an image of a retina, it is substituting for the retina in the argument under discussion. So yes it is being a proxy but what would that have to do with having access to the properties of what it is a proxy of. I am completely confused here. There are all sorts of machines that can measure physical properties of tissues, which might include scanners if you put the tissue under the scanner but this seems unconnected with the original question. In any case the limitations are not biology-based perception constraints. They may have to do with how expensive a microscope you can afford, or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
I agree with Carlos that internalism and externalism may lurk behind all this, although I cannot work out in which camp Carlos stands! But to be honest I am not quite sure what you are driving at Marcel.
Maybe the problem is with the word physical. Nobody has much idea what they mean by physical but the dictionary says it covers those things that we can perceive through sight, touch and other senses. That might suggest that a physical property is something our senses can detect without needing a machine. So polarity of light would not be a physical property. But nobody uses the word like that because with something as simple as polaroid sunglasses you can perceive it.
It all seems a muddle to me.
Let's take the example of 'light': Light has physical properties, light has human-perceived physical properties and light has machine-measured physical properties. Is it possible that the three levels differ, and if the three levels differ, what are the consequences for empirical research?
Hypothetical science evolution: We know that the techniques from yesterday (>2000 years ago, the time of the ancient Greeks) ) did not measure the same aspects of light than the techniques from today, so why not assuming there will be machines in the future discovering new properties from light?
The 'physical properties' of light, assuming that means the causal relational features of light, are what they are. They are not different properties because they are ascertained in different ways, although they may be classified differently. As indicated already, machines and sunglasses allow us to know more about these. Largely because of the use of electronics and the ability to transduce information easily from one form to another we are no longer, like ants, limited in our knowledge by our biological receptors in any very interesting way. The limits relate to fundamental physical issues. There may be causal interactions in the universe that could provide further knowledge about dark matter etc. but our inability to tap into these is not an issue with our biological receptors - none of the machines we make are any better at it.
I think extrapolations about the evolution of science are suspect. You might say that if a man is taller at 20 than at 10 he should be taller still at 30, but he is not. There are very good reasons for thinking that for things like light it is unlikely that there are further properties to be discovered. Physics in the twentieth century had a lot to do with reducing the number of properties we think there are in the world in contrast to the increases seen in the previous three centuries. Electricity and magnetism were shown to be manifestations of one property, not two.
I see no reason why a text or mathematical form need simplify. The 'mathematical equations' for most nature films are now stored on DVDs as binary bits. The first scientist uses the same series of bits to generate the film to view as can his 25 friends if he emails the file to them. If they all have the same computer type and settings they will all view the same thing. They may notice different things but that is another matter.
This seems rather far away from the original question!
I agree about your film remarks, accepting that the films are not more than human products produced by human-defined machines. The film will obviously differ from what really happened when the scene was filmed.
Where putting/defining the knowledge frontiers? Maths and science language is influenced by perception constraints, or not?
Dear All,
The perception and the transmission of information in the field of biology and ecology are complex and complicated. It is not only because of the difficulty of perception but that of spatial and timely complexity.
Let us see some examples:
If one wants to assess the population of some or all species in a natural ecosystem is alone a challenge in spite of modern sampling opportunities and statistical procedures. When the animals have been collected the next step is their identification. Regarding the so called cryptic or sibling species perception of the morphology is very difficult but the study of special behavioural elements like vibrational mating songs (VMS) or molecular biological genetic investigations (MBG) are also needed. However, these are in most cases slow and expensive methods and the MBG does not work in some species. The main trouble is that one can investigate but the tiny fragment of the samples which can be identified by morphologically.
A literary example on the complexity and bias of perception were shown in the novel of Stanislaw Lem Solaris of which also a film was made. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28novel%29
Regarding the time dimension perception is even more complicated. Phenomena in the past and future are very difficult to perceive.
An example: the plague.
This is an ancient epidemic but it occurs sporadic in Asia and America these days. Its pathogen is called Yersinia pestis. Its vectors are fleas (Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis), and Northern rat flea (Nosopsyllus fasciatus) they are carried by mammal hosts like rats (Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus). It has been proved that the pathogen of the plague in ancient times may be the same which causes plague in these days http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1003349 .
There are some troubles because the role of main rat host has not been cleared yet. We do not know which rat was the carrier of plague in ancient times. Certainly, one can find many similar cases in the history of biology and medicine.
The perception itself has its impacts on the receiver, the man. The best example is the short story of Jorge Luis Borges The immortal. It shows the changed attitudes of “immortals”, the Troglodytes towards perception (information) and touches also the last manifestation of knowledge at philosophic and psychical level. As Borges wrote: the last units of remembrance are but words. In our case words are carriers of perception and transmission of information.
And my question is: who of us will say: "Argos, Ulysses' dog." "This dog lying in
the manure." http://wordscascade.com/labirynths.pdf
Dear Andras,
So many words and sentences..... Who can rapidly capture/understand the details of all this information? Some scientists devote their whole lifetime to understand a single phenomenon, to understand the content of a single book , or to understand the cultural impact of a single human personality.
The problem with me is that I can think about a single word or sentence for hours...
Cheers
Dear Marcel,
The trouble (?) is that these valuable words or sentences differ individually.
Dear Marcel,
Do you know what are the most successful words here at RG?
“Agree” and “thank you”...
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