Does Science Exist?

October 8, 2005

Raju Chidambaran poses a very interesting question whether science exists

because it is not matter. So we cannot really call Scientists the

Charvakas.

Any scientist has to admit despite the great progress made in understanding

and harnessing nature, that there are limitations to knowledge and

technology. However, even the limitations to knowledge need not be a

general one. We can study it. We can understand and discern the specific

problems that may not have a solution either because they are unanswerable

or because their computation may not yield an outcome in finite time. The

most important point in science is testability. Any thing that falls

outside the realm of testability is put in the same bin as belief and is

considered poetry or inspirational but does not get confused with the bin in

which are placed concepts termed "knowledge".

Any scientist will admit that there are a lot of things that are done, not

based on knowledge, but on faith, inspiration, poetry and fiction and we may

perhaps have no way of knowing how or what it is. However, the scientist

will carefully distinguish it and set it apart from knowledge. This

distinction is extremely important. In fact, personally I feel the current

climate in the United States is extremely political and inconducive to

science, because of the ascendancy of the religious right. It is almost as

if we are on the cusp of a second dark age in the world. Case in point, the

inability to understand how evolution and creationism are not competing

theories. One is pure speculation with no potential to provide a basis for

experiment while the other has been so useful in systematizing biology that

the effort to prove it is considered unnecessary.

When Frederick Wohler synthesized the chemical urea in 1828, it disproved

the the theory that the chemicals of living organisms are fundamentally

different from inanimate matter and started the discipline of organic

chemistry. In the 1950s the metabolic pathways were worked out. Almost all

of biochemistry today is just matter, if we look at the knowledge portion.

That does not mean things other than matter don't exist. It falls under the

umbrella of ignorance. It will remain there until tested and proved. Given

the history of "spirit" and "soul", as a handle for experiments, it has most

often proved unfruitful in adding to the bin of knowledge. Also it has

always been proven unnecessary. This is the reason why some scientists

consider such questions as too early to be able to tackle and prove, and

therefore left alone in the bin of speculation, inspiring poetry, and

philosophy. When a scientist speculates, other scientists recognize the

speculative element and if they are good scientists they will only look for

one thing in the speculation - is this giving me a new way of thinking for

an experiment to show something that has not been established today.

Otherwise just as any human being has a right to write poetry, fiction and

philosophy, a scientist also has the right to be speculative.

This is where the peer review system in science relegates the speculative

and unproductive works to the lesser known works and pushes up those that

contribute to the bin of knowledge to a more widely accepted set of works.

The science of consciousness is very new, and the expectation is that

whatever it can deposit in the bin of knowledge will be useful in making

ethical decisions in clinical settings, and provide the impetus for further

experiments.

Another point is the use of the term emergent property of matter. While

many may see it as knowledge, a hardcore scientist would term it speculation

in the absence of a better explanation. What the scientist considers deep

explanation should have mechanistic detail or a consistent demonstration of

cause and effect.

In this regard, maybe science won't be capable of adding consciousness to

the bin of knowledge in the foreseeable future. But, the interesting thing

is that they have even dared to start asking the questions and probing.