Asymptotically Objective

So, I finished reading Stenger's book of essays about slowing science down.  I was thinking of writing some more about it when I looked back at the two earlier posts and realized that I would mostly be repeating myself.  There are some interesting details along the way, but taken together I've mostly covered her basic critique and suggestion.  Scientist should drop the philosophically dubious idea that they are producing objective, authoritative knowledge, and instead focus on the particularly interesting situation they really do create -- a human system that takes into account what matters for  other parts of the cosmos in reliably useful ways.  Science is a human system with human goals, but it cares deeply about what the rest of the world "thinks".  Which is to say that the world can prove scientists wrong, which is the only way one can learn from another entity.

It's a deceptively simple suggestion, and in the later essays you can really hear how it resonates with her thinking about Whitehead and James (who she thinks Whitehead was elaborating on).  To follow all of it would be a very long conversation about Whitehead's idea that everything (including, say, elementary particles) is actually a "society" defined by its own "values", by what "matters" for that society.  The main difference between societies for Whitehead is the way their values incorporate those of other societies by way of contrast.  Which is to say the way they incorporate the possible into the real.  Like I say though, without a much longer discussion, that's not going to sound convincing or even intelligible, so after putting several everyday words in scare quotes, I'm stopping here.

I did have one final thought though, inspired by a comment from Dr. CC that has been rolling around in my head for a while now.  Is science "asymptotically objective"?

This idea seems like a natural and appealing fallback in the face of something like Kuhn's thinking about the possibility of a paradigm shift.  Sure "we once thought" that gravity "was really" the point-to-point attraction of massive bodies, "but now we know" that it's really about curved space-time.  What we thought was "objectively true" has proven to be a complete abstraction that merely worked well to help us do what we wanted.  And we're conscious that our new abstraction is also going to someday fall victim to this same pattern.  Still, though, we know that with each revolution we are somehow getting closer to the one true real explanation.  The objective world at the end of the asymptote.

This is a strange image though.  Because how is a progression of what we now freely admit are abstractions created for human purposes supposed to be magically transmuted into an "objective description" at the end of the asymptote?  And how exactly can a description be objective anyhow?  It's certainly not just in someone's head, because many of us share it.  And it's certainly not just a collective delusion because it allows us to effectively do all kinds of things.  But at the same time a description of the object is clearly not the object itself, but only one aspect of it; the one that matters for our purposes.  Whitehead calls the problem the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".  An electron is pretty clearly an idea, not a thing, so we must be pulling a fast one when we claim that the world is made up of electrons.  And no matter how much further or smaller we go in our abstractions, we're not going to ever magically hit the "objective" world with them because this same problem is going to apply.

What content would be left to the claim of asymptotic objectivity then? Isn't it really about creating ideas that allows us to do more and more with the world?  Explanations that allows us to do some new stuff on top of all the old stuff we used to be able to do?  Seems like a noble goal and a good candidate for the content behind what we'd like the claim to do.  If you believe A, you'll be able to do X and Y.  But believing B is better (slip the word "more objective" in here) because you can do X, Y, and Z.

Unfortunately, this claim doesn't seem to have anything to do with objectivity, though it does sound a lot like our idea of progress.  Once you drop the claim of objectivity though -- which seems at first may seem costless and merely semantic  -- you will also have to subtly modify your definition of progress.  Because now there's no such thing as "general progress".  There's only specific progress along a particular dimension you happen to value.  But not all of these dimensions point in the same direction and some may even be opposed (as in predictive accuracy and mathematical elegance in the standard model vs. string theory debates).  If you wanted to do Z, then believing B was definitely better.  But what if you wanted to do Q?  

This "progress" then begins to look a lot more like Brownian motion.  Or maybe an amoeba moving up a sucrose gradient at best.  It may have a direction, but there is no a priori reason to think that it's the right or unique one.  The metaphor of an asymptote only makes sense if there is some value to converge to.  If we start to see our direction as inevitably defined by our value space (so to speak), then it seems like we're wandering in a very, very large space indeed, and we're going to need to ask much more complex questions about how our values might overlap with other possible sets of values (say, alien or computer values).

A final thought occurs to me here.  One I don't completely understand  In some sense, Brownian motion does have a sort of asymptote that we call "equilibrium" -- the diffusion of something to occupy a volume at a uniform concentration.  Maybe I've inadvertently defined something exactly like general progress?  Perhaps, yes, science always has a particular direction at a particular time, but maybe somehow, on average over time, it expands in every direction to completely describe everything that could matter about the world?  This is a wildly ambitious hypothesis that makes the physicist's dreams of a final theory-of-everything look like a silly footnote.  Because were they to announce the current version of this theory tomorrow, it still wouldn't describe a fraction of the things that matter just to me -- like why Deleuze is so great or even whether it will rain April 3, 2056452.  But maybe, someday, there could be an ever bigger ToE that would explain those things?

Tough question.  I'm going to go with Stuart Kauffman on this one though, and posit that the universe is actually non-ergodic.

Consider next the number of proteins with 200 amino acids: 20 to the 200th power. Were the 10 to the 80th particles in the known universe doing nothing but making proteins length 200 on the Planck time scale, and the universe is some 10 to the 17th seconds old, it would require 10 to the 39th lifetimes of the universe to make all possible proteins length 200 just once. But this means that, above the level of atoms, the universe is on a unique trajectory. It is vastly non-ergodic. Then we will never make all complex molecules, organs, organisms, or social systems.

 And if life and matter is wandering through this non-ergodic universe, then so are our explanations of it.