Even a broken watch tells the right time twice a day. However, to know that the watch is broken, we must observe it when it tells the time incorrectly rather than when it tells it correctly. This analogy is a useful way to understand the problem in modern science because clearly there are times in which science makes correct predictions. Those who argue that science works only look at science when it seems to work correctly. To know that they are looking at a broken watch, they would have to look at it when its predictions break down — either because the prediction isn’t there, or the prediction disagrees with observation.
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Common Examples of Scientific Failures
There are numerous examples of problems in modern science, that are generally well-known in scientific circles but little understood outside of it. For instance, everyone uses electronic gadgets, which employ the flow of electrons, although no one knows what an electron is or why the theory that describes it (quantum theory) only describes the electron statistically rather than deterministically. The behavior of electrons further depends upon the experimental setup, so the electron somehow “knows” what we are trying to do.
A collection of electrons also behaves as if the particles were entangled, rather than independent. The notion of a particle, as it was held in classical physics, has now collapsed, and a new understanding of such entangled particles has not yet emerged.
We have used air-conditioners and heaters. However, little do most people know that the scientific theories that describe electrons and heat are logically incompatible. The theory of electrons is linear, while that of heat is non-linear. Even though these two theories work separately, we don’t know how they can be brought together. There is no theory that can predict what will happen when your computer heats up. To avoid the unpredictability of heated computers, the computers are designed to shut down when they have heated up.
This ability in technology belies the problem that we could not shut down the power at the beginning of the universe, deep within the earth’s crust or in the sun. The interaction between thermodynamics and quantum theory, the first non-linear and the second linear is unknown.
In computing theory, we design and execute only those programs which we know can be solved, and solved optimally. The problems that we know cannot be solved—e.g., the problem of determining whether a program is good or malicious—we don’t try to solve. The users are left to deal with the problem—e.g., spam, viruses, trojans, etc.—if they ever tried to use the technology. The problems of identity and privacy are similarly unsolvable in principle, even though we build fences to protect ourselves in some well-known cases, but they are so few as compared to the open vulnerabilities that the fence builders are always falling behind the hackers. The problems of computer security are fundamental to computing theory due to which we cannot detect the malicious intent from a good intent.
Millions of people die of cancer or viruses not because we don’t understand the mechanism of killing the causes of diseases, but because we don’t know how to shoot the target accurately. If your method of shooting is inaccurate, it would kill the host rather than the invader. Technological development aims to find improved accuracy for the bullets, although the living being’s immune response knows how to do that. Our medicines, however, spray the bullets in the hope that they will probabilistically hit the enemies more than the citizens.
In every criminal justice system, many criminals go scot-free because we are unable to read the criminal’s mind. In our documentaries, books or movies on the subject, we extol the beauty of criminal forensics which relies on the criminal being foolish and leaving behind traces of evidence. Even polygraph tests are inadmissible in most justice systems because they can be beaten. The criminal knows whether or not she or he committed the crime. But we have no way of mapping the brain and body to their mental state (i.e. the knowledge of crime). If the mind is identical to the brain and body, then why aren’t we able to decode the physical states into mental states?
Why would we torture terrorists if we knew how to read their minds by reading their bodies?
Fencing Scientific Failures
The technology around us has many limits. We don’t understand that these limits are consequences of fundamental problems, but we work around the unsolved problem. Oftentimes, the workarounds are built to prevent the system from entering the state where it will fail. For instance, we can shut down the computer when it heats up, or we can set up a firewall or intrusion detection system to protect our computers from malicious attacks, or eliminate a polygraph test from admissible evidence because it might be erroneous, or caveat the success of a drug with a certain limited percentage of cases because we just don’t know when and why it works or fails. It is as if we know that the watch will tell the time correctly only twice a day, so we decide to hide the watch at any other time.
In every area of technology, you see something working but you also see a lot of it failing. The failures, however, are fenced better as the technology develops, although not solved. The improved methods of fencing are considered advancements in science, while fundamental problems still lurk just beneath the surface. People who argue that science is working aren’t able to distinguish between the grounds and the fence: they cannot see that the existence of the fence itself is an unsolved problem. The fencing mechanisms have become so pervasive that we treat them as part of what science is capable of doing rather than as things that arise from its basic failures.
The above examples are by no means exhaustive. They are just the common ones that everyone has encountered in one way or another. Beyond these failures, there are bigger problems in areas that are yet not developed enough to form technologies. For instance, there are foundational problems in complex systems with numerous interactions, the nature of perception, mind, and meaning, cosmological quandaries like dark energy and dark matter, the problem of life’s origin, the singularities at the origin of the universe, the problem of free will and morality, etc. These are even more removed from the realm of technology because we do not understand how any of it works.
When you recognize the times when science fails, or when its failures are saved by fences, the times when science works pale in comparison. That’s when the broken watch analogy becomes pertinent—the watch is broken most of the time, although it sometimes seems to work.
Are These Separate or Related Issues?
A problem is never truly understood until it has been solved. The observed symptoms of a problem may indicate a very minor change, or, on the contrary, a complete overhaul of the underlying mechanism, and it is not possible to know beforehand which way we need to go about it. Computer programmers are quite familiar with this phenomenon where a small error can lead to a large catastrophe while a major design flaw may only result in cosmetic problems. This fact holds true for science as well. When we see the above failures, we aren’t immediately sure if these are minor problems to be solved, or entail major revisions to science. Lord Kelvin, for instance, would have thought that black-body radiation and the constant speed of light only require minor adjustments to the established scientific view of the time.
The determination of whether the problem needs a serious change or a cosmetic one requires a deeper analysis of the problem. This analysis has been ongoing in all areas of science for decades, and the answers are so hard that it is considered professional suicide to spend your career in trying to solve the problem: you may never solve it, and jeopardize your career. These days hardly anyone today works on the foundations of quantum physics, the foundations of number theory or set theory, or questions the idea of a mechanical theory of computation. Everyone knows that these are the biggest problems of our times, but few would risk their career in trying to solve them.
My approach to this scientific paralysis has been to reduce the number of problems to be solved to just one, by showing how solutions would naturally arise if material objects were symbols of meanings. Once multiple problems have been reduced to a single problem, then we begin to see the gravity of the situation: we realize that there is a serious problem that requires a fundamental rather than cosmetic change. The next step is to show what that fundamental change would look like. In my writings, I have attempted to show how all problems in science require only one change—a change in our view of space-time from linear, homogeneous, and isotropic to hierarchical, typed, and closed. I have also described a mathematical structure that would make this structure comprehensible. Since that structure requires a shift in the nature of logic and numbers, I am currently working on the formulation of a new kind of modal logic to make this formally describable.
In a simple sense, the location of an object (i.e. its position in space and time) must be described like a postal address and a clock time rather than like an infinitesimal point in an infinite, flat, and uniform expanse. The collection of all these entities constitutes a hierarchical structure, in which nodes are types rather than quantities. The quantification, in fact, depends on first finding the types.
How Broken Is Science?
Science is not broken in its details but in its fundamentals. The fix is a revision in our notion of space and time. The problem with science is that we are trying to reduce a hierarchical structure to a flat structure. All such reductions must be either inconsistent or incomplete. For instance, if we were to try to reduce the idea of color to a set of colors, the reduction would be incomplete. If, however, we took that specific set of colors to constitute a complete reduction of the idea of color, then the description would be inconsistent.
Scientists who assert that science is working are like Lord Kelvin who thought that black-body radiation and the constant speed of light would fit into the conceptual framework of classical physics. The problems facing science today are far more profound, varied, and pervasive than the ones previously seen. Their fix, accordingly, also requires a fundamental shift in our thinking.
The watch is broken, and the scientists who stick to the current materialist ideology are the makers of this broken watch, and they don’t realize how broken it actually is. They try to move the needles of this watch to keep the appearance that the watch is working, not recognizing that the underlying mechanism itself needs an overhaul. The pedestrians watching this exercise marvel at the fact that this moving needle gives them useful technology, and therefore science must be correct. The profound problems of incompleteness, indeterminism, irreversibility, and incomputability are hidden from their vision because scientists don’t acknowledge their failures; they extol the beauty of the fences.
Wow. How interesting. I really think we would be getting into the realm of theology/Christology. For instance, in the context of their work, the terms ‘measurement’ and ‘observation’, are synonyms to physicists. The action of doing so in relation, say, to the double-slit experiment.
Observation, however, entails an act of the Will. So, not only is God, the Designer’s intentionality significant, the term is also significant in terms of the observing scientist. Outside of the context design in nature, however, when has ‘intentionality’ on man’s part, our Will, ever been addressed in physics. What is its nature? Well, it is a gift partaking of God, the Creator’s own nature and attaches to the spirit together with the two other faculties of the soul: ‘memory’ and ‘understanding’.
The Catholic church does not make such pronouncements lightly, and they can be relied upon. As a matter of fact, these can be discerned from passages in scripture. From Our Lady’s Magnificat, we read the following: ‘My soul glorifies the Lord. My spirit rejoices in God my saviour, whereby we can see that, as one would expect form the ghostly morphology, tends to be of a passive nature, the soul, with it three faculties, of an active nature.
It seems the human person is the lynch-pin of everything, QM suggesting that we are each born into, live and die, in a little world of our own, which is, however, seamlessly coordinated with those of our brothers and sisters at the classical level.
The preponderance of especially devout scientists in the roll call of great scientist and paradigm-changers, moreover, suggests that they are optimally geared to their intellectual pursuit by an elision of a spiritual faith-knowledge continuum with a secular knowledge continuum (turning on a switch for instance, without the absolute crtaity that the light will come onl ), both corresponding to time and space, respectively.
What is interesting concerning the respective meanings of the term, ‘faith’ is as much about commitment as belief, which can be quite abstract, even as regards the spiritual s-k continuum: the devil believes and trembles, as James states in his epistle.
The relation between the problems in science and the question of free will are somewhat more profound than how you have described above.
When you are studying the world, and you don’t know (and cannot know) everything in the universe, you have the choice of focusing your attention on limited parts of the world and modeling them in your theory and explanation. This choice is our free will. We cannot attend to everything in the world simultaneously, so choice must exist if we can potentially know everything but cannot know them simultaneously. This choice is simply the attention we pay to certain parts of the world while neglecting others.
Science has commonly supposed that this attention focusing is only a matter of our experience but it makes no difference upon our theories. This is patently false because if you focus upon limited parts of the world, you will also potentially arrive at limited theories about the world – if the universe is not uniform. Limited focus works if the universe is uniform. So, now, the question is whether the universe is uniform – i.e., are all parts of the universe comprising a single type of material entity?
A well known fact about modern science is that the theory that focuses on sub-atomic particles (quantum theory) contradicts the theory that focuses upon macroscopic objects (thermodynamics), which in turn contradicts the theory that focuses upon the cosmos as a whole (general relativity). As you focus attention on different parts of the universe, you not only get different experiences, but also different theories. We cannot reconcile these theories unless we recognize that the big thing is not of the same type as the small thing, and you cannot just scale a physical theory from small to big.
This leads to the paradox of knowledge: if we only focus upon parts of the world, our knowledge will be incomplete; however, we cannot focus upon everything in the universe at once given that our consciousness can only focus upon limited subsets at any time. The solution to this problem requires the existence of something which our consciousness can totally focus upon and yet that something will give us complete knowledge. In other words, you need a part that can represent the whole.
The failure of material knowledge is related to the existence of choices but only because (1) we cannot know the entire universe, (2) the universe is not uniform, and (3) limited knowledge leads to incomplete theories. Complete knowledge requires parts which represent the whole – sort of like the word “universe” inside the universe. This presents a segue into religion, where deities, scriptures, and spiritualists can provide the complete truth, because they are a representation of the whole truth. But, we first need to see the problem of knowledge before see its solution in religion!
I believe the last thing on the minds of NDEers when they experience the sense of ‘knowing all things’, as some of them did, a breakdown of the whys and wherefors by use of the analytical intelligence, would have been far from their mind. Though I do remember the case of an eccentric-seeming pharmacist (or chemist) who, while others were overcome with awe before God, who tends to appear, in large measure at least, as an ineffable, bright, yet soft, light, wondered what the luminosity reading would be on a meter!!!!