tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1485997200234349788.post6332524990915555599..comments2024-03-07T12:48:21.070+00:00Comments on MAGONIA REVIEW: HITTING THE BUFFERSUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1485997200234349788.post-69114452885425254242015-06-13T10:44:16.763+01:002015-06-13T10:44:16.763+01:00I have the '96 edition, a good book, I appreci...I have the '96 edition, a good book, I appreciate Horgan's writings. And yet it has its philosophical & scientific shortcomings. One of the several problems is that Horgan believes we have comprehended nature's evolution, we just need to fill in the details on her mechanisms. However there are fundamentals there that remain beyond our grasp,controversial eg the revolution in epigenetics, that upsets a few apple-carts. We may be looking at the data all wrong. Or partially so. New discoveries in phylogenetics, paleontology have implications to macroevolution that we are only beginning to get to grips with. This has nothing to do with Creationism. This is just a small smattering of scientific discoveries that upset previously sacrosanct dogma. <br /><br />Just one problem - it's impossible for one person to know much about anything in the sciences, because there is too much to know, it spirals exponentially,one can easily get bogged down and not see the real issues/problems otherwise staring us in the face. So there's much that Hogan doesn't have a clue about, and that's not his fault. Nobody has much of a clue about very much in the sciences, pretense and bluff and bluster to the contrary (Dennett and Dawkins are caricatures, explaining everything away). However there is much that he clearly doesn't want to know about. Like the man looking for lost keys under the lamplight because that's where the light is, not on the dark pavement where he actually lost them in the first place. <br /><br />Also what of the obvious parallel with physics in the late 19th century, when it was believed that Newtonian mechanics explained it all, we just needed to sort out the few sticky anomalies and everything would be complete?! And then of course along came Einstein, Planck, Born, Bohr, Heisenberg etc. - Relativity and QM... . This precedent, this humbling experience in physics - and it is twentieth-century physics! - appears lost on Horgan. Or he just thinks this time it is complete, this time it's different!<br /><br />And there are literally mountains of anomalies today in every discipline one looks. And they are growing. If anything we know less than we ever did. Whether this shows us the limits of science or the limits of human potential within the sciences, is another matter. Perhaps both. <br /><br />If we look at ufology alone, ignoring its sorry state today, taking into account that the ET bugaboo is long discredited, none of us can agree on just if it is at least a potential scientific discipline and just how it is scientific. And if there is a physical/quasi-physical aspect to it, how so and to what degree? If anything ufology tells us more about the investigating ufologist (and witnesses) than it does about any objective UFO phenomenon. In no other discipline is the Alice in Wonder looking glass more apparent, and so from a Kuhnian perspective (the sociology of science), ufology is the exhibit A that begs the question, well several questions and we go round in circles. Namely is ufology science, religion, psychology, culture? It depends on the investigator, the tools we use, the way we look at it - but this is as true of so-called objective science as ufology, in the former it is just more subtle, sophisticated. That is the point on which Kuhn's fame rests, and since the publication of his landmark book, it is only more apparent (and more problematic). This is why talk of "more philosophical than scientific" can miss the mark, there is what is called 'the demarcation problem' between science and religion/philosophy. Nobody knows where the demarcation or boundary is, the lines are blurred and overlap. When one may well be wrong about the data or phenomena that one is studying, at least in part, and where it may lead, there is no way one can draw a clear black line or know where to draw it. It's like trying to catch a mist with a butterfly net. Which sums up I suppose ufology, but not only ufology. That's the thing. <br /><br /> Lawrencehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04531198239870181089noreply@blogger.com