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Hi Harv,
yes i was off base with my statement about the pipeline. actually i believe Dick holds that the pipeline is unexaminable . the explanation of our senses is left open as an unanswerable question. so i believe in a sense any given person's fundamental definitions that such person holds as true is a kind of reflection of that unexaminable pipeline. reason being our fundamental definitions 'carry' an unexaminable nature about them, an adhocness if you will. those definitions are simply taken as true essentially because they seem so. it would be safe to say that each of us has multitudes of such fundamental definitions and that each of us hold differing definitions but that there are also many such definitions that we for the most part hold in common. again though those definitions are for each of us essentially 'unquestionably' true thus they have this unexaminable nature about them.
it is true that it was science and not Dick who found the Lorenzian transformations must supercede the Galilean transformations. but the point is that Galilean transformations are intuitive (similar to our fundamental definitions) while the need to use Lorenzian transformations points to the fact that our intuitive fundamental definitions are not sufficient to more fully discern reality.
all of this is not to say that our senses, intuition and fundamental definitions should be deligated to the trash bin. it simply points out that it can be useful to know what we can discern about reality with no assumptions. such reality and the constraints we are forced to use in the discernment of that reality can then be used as a measure against the science that we already have. this should be able to provide at the very least questions that can help us better understand science as we go about the business of exploiting nature.
certainly Dick has made some assumptions, openly and there are others that are inherit in any reasoned endeavor. Dick does not claim to have discovered a theory, but to have designed an analytic pipeline which will transform any random collection of data into a mental image consistent with physics providing us powers of deduction and correlation.
long ago mankind dealing with his envirenment came up with counting, adding, subtracting and geometric considerations and mathematics was born. similarly science was born of mankinds attempt to understand and use the physical world. the essence of these process's is abstraction of reality into concepts that can be manipulated mentaly and then applied to the physical world. in the case of science the abstractions of reality have been made 'piece meal' a step at a time. what Dick has attempted to do is take the whole of reality in one fell swoop and abstract it.
regards tim |
