Modern Science is quackery; here is why

[brunocampello]

The modern science observes certain things in some respect; therefore, it only observes aspects, and aspects cut out according to the hypotheses and constants that itself intends to observe. There is a highly subjectivist and abstractist element about it, which makes the whole philosophy developed from this tradition of modern science extremely subjective in nature.


At the beginning of modernity arises, especially with Lord Bacon, the idea that physical nature is a hidden code, that is, it does not reveal itself to us, but disguises itself, and therefore to understand it one must force it and you force it through the experiment. In the experiment, you force natural forces to act in an unnatural way so that you can understand what is the secret deep within nature. Every modern idea of ​​the scientific experiment is like this. You create an artificial situation, nonexistent in nature, using natural forces to do something that they usually don’t, and through this experiment you try to understand how they work in reality. The totality of modern science is that. Later, Kant will summarize this by saying, according to Bacon, that the scientist does not stand before nature as an observer, who accepts it as it is, but stands as a policeman who squeezes her and forces her to say something. It follows that these results obtained through this experiment do exist, but only under the conditions in which the experiment was designed. Through experiment you can hypothetically grasp a certain relationship between elements of nature, but in nature these relationships exist in the midst of billions of other relationships, of an infinite number of other relationships. You just detached one, observed it, and said, “This one exists”. If you had asked another question and invented another experiment, you would find something else entirely. That is, the number of experiments you can do is unlimited, but they will never reach the full range of nature. Second, these experiments show not how nature behaves in itself. Because it responds to human action and the way it works in itself is never exactly the same, there is always a slight difference, because everything that goes on in nature is a concrete fact.

A concrete fact is the fact taken not only in the logical relation that expresses it, but in all the accidents necessary for it to happen. It is precisely these accidents that the experiment isolates: the accidental element is removed and only the logical definition is left behind. In nature there is no such fact, only concrete facts. Imagine how many experiments humans have done since inventing this business. A large number, no doubt. But what is this set of experiments in the face of all concrete facts? It is zero. This means that the whole of what experimental science can know is nothing compared to real nature. And this real nature can be known in itself only by contemplative observation that accepts it in its entirety as a mysterious fact, which is what it really is. That is, the concrete reality taken in its total presence is a mystery, no doubt, and the totality of what science knows about nature is a bean, that does not say what nature is or does, but how it reacts to certain human questions and provocations.
The criticism that philosophers of modernity — Bacon, Galileo, among others — made to scholastic science is that it always took nature as it presented itself, whereas they thought, “We have to force nature to do what we want”. Both things exist. You can look at it both ways, or even combine it. But if you take this new way, this new science, and superimpose the other, so you literally got out of reality, because science doesn’t investigate concrete facts, it only investigates certain relationships that are proportional to the question you asked. What is a scientific theory? What is a scientific hypothesis? The scientific hypothesis is the assumption that a certain set of facts will behave according to a hypothetical constant if you select the facts to investigate according to what that same constant determines. This is the same as saying that every scientific conclusion is tautological. What determines the clipping of the facts to be studied? The constant you want to find out. And when these facts then behave according to the constant, you say the experiment worked. But they have to work! They only go wrong if you selected wrong, or made the wrong observations, or if the constant you assumed does not exist.

This means that this set of constants observed by science are not reality, but certain possibilities that the human being has highlighted from the immeasurable background of reality, isolating them from all possible accidentalities, isolating them from all concreteness and looking only at that. Of course this has been very successful, especially in technical results, applications and unlimited techniques. Because if you did the cut yourself, you did it for some purpose and it is no wonder that you can accomplish that goal because you did the experiment exactly for that. Only having proceeded to act in the nature as a police officer — Kant says “investigative judge”, because in Germany at the time, the investigator was the investigative judge and not the police — one can say that the police officer get to know the people he’s investigating? No, because he only cares about them in some possible, isolated way of the whole, and get an answer to that specific question he asked. Can you say that people considered solely from the police point of view exist? No, they don’t exist, they are abstractions, of course. This is one aspect of them among millions of possible aspects. For any police event to happen, there needs to be an infinity accidents that are totally unrelated to the police interest. For example, such a crime happened on such a street, on the corner of such a building. Who built the building? If there was no building, no street, no crime could happen on that particular place. But is the construction of the building of any interest from the police point of view? No. It’s another science, another completely different art. The bandit fired, but it was very windy and there was a slight deviation from the projectile that hit another person. Is there a police method for studying the direction of the winds? No, this is another completely different science. If you take the whole of the existing sciences and articulate their points of view all of you get a series of lines that converge at some points. Do these lines make up a real universe? No way, they make up a set of hypothetical schemes — some work harder, others less — but none correspond to concrete reality.

From the moment this police point of view was adopted as a scientific norm, our whole view of material nature was determined by our police interest and not by nature itself. Two centuries later, Kant arrived and said that all our knowledge of nature results from the projection of our cognitive schemes onto an object that remains unreachable, that is, that we know nothing about nature itself, we only know about our own projected mental schemes. Later Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, all these people, said:

“The structures of scientific theories all change suddenly, for nothing. You believe in one thing and the next day you don’t believe in anything, that is, it is all subjective”


This is the result of Lord Bacon’s choice. When you privilege the police point of view, you prefer the viewer’s point of view, not the object’s. As a result, as much as you know, everything will continue to seem subjective to you, because you have not complemented this active and interrogative viewpoint with the contemplative and passive viewpoint that accepts the whole of nature as it presents itself; you have suppressed nature as an object of real experience and exchanged it for nature as a scientific object, which, says Lord Bacon, is forcing nature to do what it does not naturally do in a kind of unnatural nature.

To compensate for this displacement from the material object, science introduces the element of measurement and mathematical accuracy. But mathematical accuracy obviously cannot reconstitute the object, because it also results from the police attitude and also from the subject. You make the measurement, it is not nature that measures itself. From the human point of view, the point of view of the researcher is privileged and from this comes naturally the modern subjectivism. Modern science is the direct author of modern subjectivism, it has no escape. This means that when a subject alleges, in a discussion, objective facts proven by science, he does not know what he is talking about. Modern science and subjectivism are exactly the same thing. Modern science came along with Descartes’ rationalist idealism, pursued Kant’s radical subjectivism, and ended with the current deconstructionism, in which no one else believes in anything, there is no objective reality or anything at all. This is all a kind of a childhood disease.

Modern science was born with this childhood illness of subjectivism. It will be necessary to cure it of this, but it can only be cured by articulating the active and interrogative point of view with the contemplative attitude of accepting the concrete reality.

[Ampedup_van]

Indeed, subjectivism is enmeshed in Modern Science. Though we try to formulate measures and countermeasures to come up with a reliable and objective conclusions as much possible. However, all these methods are at best used to lessen the prevailing subjectivism.

The problem of subjectivism in modern science stems from 2 factors: the observer and the nature or thing being observed. The observer or us humans, are inclined to our biases and our mind works as filters. Modern science's remedy towards this inclination is by having to repeatedly perform and validate such data by different observers in different populations. Nature or the thing being observed at is the most problematic in the sense that everything in nature is interconnected and there is a lot of variation in nature. To quote Spinoza, Truth is inexhaustible. Experimentation in an artificial environment, allows researchers to isolate an event or thing to be observed to lessen other interferences in nature. Another dilemma in observing nature is that, the observant cannot make such observations without interacting with the thing being observed in a way or another.

Indeed, modern science have, to some extent, a dose of subjectivism which comes from both ends of the observant and nature. But there are fundamental data, that can be observed objectively and repeatedly in nature. Thus, it can be inferred that not all of modern science is born out of subjectivism. Rather than considering everything in modern science as subjective, modern science should be treated as a part and parcel of reality.

[Papus79]

I think the problem science is having is a similar problem that mainstream media is having (at least in the US) - ie. neither should be 'for-profit' ventures. When they become for-profit ventures and are forced to chase grant money around you have far worse replication, no one wants to do the drudge work as such, null results don't get published as often as they should, ie. the wheels of what gave the scientific endeavor enough integrity to entrust our read of reality to have been coming off due to that. Careerism has also been a threat everywhere, the sciences no less, so the expression 'Science progresses one funeral at a time' has held a fair amount of water.

[Terrapin Station]

In my view the biggest problem with science is that a lot of it is instrumentalist, where the instrumentalism is largely based on mathematical conventions and convenient ways to mentally "visualize" the mathematical ideas in imaginative experiential terms, but scientists typically think and talk about it as if it's not just instrumentalist, as if the mathematics and especially the imaginative ways of thinking about it are literally picking out what's ontologically the case independent of us.

Thus we wind up with nonsense not only like "multiverse" talk, the idea of "wormholes" in spacetime, the possibility of backwards time travel, "dark matter" and "dark energy," etc., but nonsense like the idea of energy existing on its own, the notion of fields, the idea of space/time as "things in themselves," a whole host of quantum mechanics nonsense, etc.

[Faustus5]

Thus we wind up with nonsense not only like "multiverse" talk, the idea of "wormholes" in spacetime, the possibility of backwards time travel, "dark matter" and "dark energy," etc., but nonsense like the idea of energy existing on its own, the notion of fields, the idea of space/time as "things in themselves," a whole host of quantum mechanics nonsense, etc.

What is "nonsense" about dark matter, dark energy, or wormholes?

[Sculptor1]

Thus we wind up with nonsense not only like "multiverse" talk, the idea of "wormholes" in spacetime, the possibility of backwards time travel, "dark matter" and "dark energy," etc., but nonsense like the idea of energy existing on its own, the notion of fields, the idea of space/time as "things in themselves," a whole host of quantum mechanics nonsense, etc.

What is "nonsense" about dark matter, dark energy, or wormholes?

They are speculations treated as real things.

[Sculptor1]

But science has always had these speculations treated as real thing.
Copernicus used Aristotelian perfect circles in his cosmology. This meant his heliocentric model had to add 14 extra epicycles over an above Ptolemy.
When Kepler figured out the equations of planetary motion in his Astronomia Nova he included the reason for the positions of the planets based on Platonic Solids. Further empiricism was needed to show this false.
Isaac Newton was a keen astrologer and alchemist. and ideas from these "sciences" informed his astronomy.
So where, exactly has science ever not done this?

[Faustus5]

They are speculations treated as real things.

I don't know of any serious, mainstream scientist who thinks any of those things are anything other than tentative proposals in need of further evidence and understanding. At least in the case of dark matter and dark energy, there is objectively something that requires an explanation, even if the ones being offered at the moment prove inadequate.

[Papus79]

What is "nonsense" about dark matter, dark energy, or wormholes?

This seems to be a mixed bag.

With some things they're attempts to Bondo or duct tape models that have passed their sell-by date (particularly dark matter / dark energy seem to be this way). At other times, especially when people say that we took a wrong turn at Einstein, Bohr, Planck, etc., there's also the issue of people just not liking the implications of what they're hearing.

[Steve3007]

The OP could be about various things. Hard to tell exactly what.

It seems vaguely to be saying that science is empirical, that this means it creates theories about the world based on observations, that observations require observers and that observers are things in the world (as opposed to detached, omniscient beings) who therefore necessarily select what they want to observe and what they think they can neglect to observe (that might be the purpose of the "police" metaphor). Therefore science is "quackery".

Obviously that conclusion doesn't follow from that premise. Quackery means pretending to be something you're not, or to have knowledge that you don't have. A blanket assertion that science pretends observers are detached omniscient beings is clearly ridiculous.

In the final paragraph it looks as though it's going to propose a better alternative ("cure") to this common practice of finding out about the world by looking at it:

Modern science was born with this childhood illness of subjectivism. It will be necessary to cure it of this, but it can only be cured by articulating the active and interrogative point of view with the contemplative attitude of accepting the concrete reality.

A guess at what that might mean: "When you're observing stuff, don't forget your ontology."

But that is just a guess. If that is what it means, I don't see the sense in which it constitutes a "cure" for anything.

[Steve3007]

When you privilege the police point of view, you prefer the viewer’s point of view, not the object’s.

Yes, I tend to go with the point of view of things that can view - a.k.a viewers.

[Atla]

In the experiment, you force natural forces to act in an unnatural way so that you can understand what is the secret deep within nature. Every modern idea of ​​the scientific experiment is like this. You create an artificial situation, nonexistent in nature, using natural forces to do something that they usually don’t, and through this experiment you try to understand how they work in reality. The totality of modern science is that.

I think this is completely untrue. Science with the capital 'S' discovers ways how the world naturally behaves, without exception. One counterexample is enough to refute one's idea. Those so-called 'artificial' situations are just rearrangements of, variations on 'non-articial' situations.

[Terrapin Station]

Thus we wind up with nonsense not only like "multiverse" talk, the idea of "wormholes" in spacetime, the possibility of backwards time travel, "dark matter" and "dark energy," etc., but nonsense like the idea of energy existing on its own, the notion of fields, the idea of space/time as "things in themselves," a whole host of quantum mechanics nonsense, etc.

What is "nonsense" about dark matter, dark energy, or wormholes?

So, first, space/time don't exist "on their own" in any manner for there to be "wormholes" in it. Space/time are not things/substances/etc. of any sort, they're not "containers" for "things to be in" etc.

Re energy, the notion of it existing "on its own" in any sense is incoherent.

"Dark" matter and energy are simply ways of "balancing the books" without having to retool either mathematics or physical theory based upon current mathematics. It would be like inventing "dark expenses" when your checkbook doesn't balance and you're not making any obvious mistakes in the mathematics.

[Faustus5]

"Dark" matter and energy are simply ways of "balancing the books" without having to retool either mathematics or physical theory based upon current mathematics. It would be like inventing "dark expenses" when your checkbook doesn't balance and you're not making any obvious mistakes in the mathematics.

Do you have a better approach to explaining the measurement anomalies that dark energy and matter attempt to explain? Calling the approach favored by a majority of scientists "nonsense" seems a bit much.

[Terrapin Station]

"Dark" matter and energy are simply ways of "balancing the books" without having to retool either mathematics or physical theory based upon current mathematics. It would be like inventing "dark expenses" when your checkbook doesn't balance and you're not making any obvious mistakes in the mathematics.

Do you have a better approach to explaining the measurement anomalies that dark energy and matter attempt to explain? Calling the approach favored by a majority of scientists "nonsense" seems a bit much.

Yes. The better approach is acknowledging that we're simply talking about it instrumentally in terms of the mathematics and current theories we use. The better approach amounts to not taking the things we imagine to help make the mathematics and conventions more relatable (such as "dark matter"/"dark energy") to amount to a literal ontological reality.