The Supreme Scientific Method of Universal Value Logic

The Supreme Scientific Method
of Universal Value Logic:

The Logical-Value Super-Telescope

of the Second Scientific Revolution

Conrad.Schneiker@Gmail.com

www.AthenaLab.com

Rough Draft / Outline

This copy was revised on Tuesday, 02/07/2006 at 4:15:00 AM MST.

This book is updated approximately weekly—please check link below for newest version:

(http://www.AthenaLab.com/The_Supreme_Scientific_Method.pdf)

0. Brief Abstract

It’s fairly easy to prove with absolute certainty that not all of our knowledge can be objectively mistaken, and thereby to also generate a specific (although semi-trivial) example. However, the most important, notoriously-difficult, and seeming-unsolvable problem of both science and philosophy is how to go far beyond such extremely narrow provable facts. Finding the provably-correct, universal, objective, absolute, core foundations of all science is the supremely important central problem of establishing the genuinely scientific philosophy of science. Fortunately, all the essential component solutions for this system have been multiply-discovered and “hidden in plain sight”, within the vast literature variously relating to this subject.

Reasoning to and from first principles is infamously fallible. Fortunately the systematic structure of this system powerfully facilitates self-correction—indeed this system is the ultimate logical-methodological basis of all self-correction. This instrumental logical-value system is necessarily (implicitly) logically-presupposed by all (explicitly conceptually-conscious) realistic thinking. This absolutely-essential, logically-universal, reflexively-invariant character makes the (post-discovery) derivation and identity proofs of this system’s logically-supreme axioms surprisingly straightforward. This extraordinary scientific-cultural achievement is almost totally unrecognized (as of 2005), partly because some very-widely-prevailing misconceptions make it somewhat counterintuitive. The spread of this system involves major corrections to prevailing world views, analogous to the first scientific revolution’s shift from earth-centered to sun-centered astronomy. This is indeed the “second scientific revolution”, and it’s already underway.

I call this generalized self-correcting and self-extending process for deriving (and extending) this “fundamental science of all science” the “supreme scientific method”. I report on these here, along with some of their many intriguing, powerful, and far-ranging implications. Have a look through the “logical telescope of the second scientific revolution” and see for yourself. :-)

1. Extended Abstract

The first scientific revolution was ironically radically incomplete in having failed to discover, develop, and solidly establish it’s genuinely-scientific and logically-rigorous philosophical foundations. The overwhelming knowledge explosion, the academic population explosion, and the communication revolution have all collectively tended to thwart scientific consolidation in the realm of philosophy. Finding the provably-correct, universal, objective, absolute, core foundations of all science is thus the supremely important central problem of establishing the genuinely scientific philosophy of science. No commonly accepted solution to this great problem has emerged, despite the prodigious amount of 20th century work directed at various aspects of it.

This is a surprisingly tricky and exceptionally challenging problem (until you know the answer). It taught us the hard way that our minds and universe are extraordinarily sophisticated and subtle beyond belief. Any systematic solution will necessarily seem suspect by having to selectively reject several widely-accepted “scientific” sacred cows (resulting from inevitable errors made in ignorance of that solution). Even so, this problem’s seeming persistence into the 21st century is still a bizarre and even scandalous scientific anomaly. However, all the essential component solutions of this problem were definitely known by the 1990s (and likely very much earlier). And yet this extraordinary scientific-cultural achievement is almost totally unrecognized, although all the component solutions are published (and mostly now available on the web), effectively “hidden in plain sight”. However, as of 2005, I’d still not seen a full-fledged solution.

So I’ve attempted to provide a preliminary presentation of the solution here. To considerably over-simplify (for the sake of brevity), the key ideas involve systematically and comprehensively pursuing the implications of the several well-known logical characteristics of reflexive self-consistency and reflexive self-contradiction. These are manifestations of an instrumental logical-value system is necessarily (implicitly) logically-presupposed by all (explicitly conceptually-conscious) realistic thinking. This absolutely-essential, logically-universal, reflexively-invariant character makes the process of (post-discovery) validating this system’s logically-supreme axioms surprisingly straightforward. This process shows that (1) the foundations of universal logic are much more extensive than conventionally conceived—the 2 ancient laws of logic and the more-recently-discovered praxeology axiom are part of an extended family of at least a dozen universal axiomatic laws, (2) universal logic is intensional logic, (3) this is normative system that intrinsically constitutes the universally-supreme framework of instrumental ethics, (4) this instrumental-methodological ethics of logically realistic thinking constitutes the “supreme scientific method” that is logically prior to all other scientific methods, (5) the axiomatically-grounded span of non-provisional, non-hypothetical, provably valid, necessary scientific fact (including instrumental objective values) is very much greater than conventionally believed, (6) this greatly-extended content is a further constitutive part of the logically-primary ethical framework of science, and (7) this system constitutes the greatest universal common good.

The resolution of this crucial problem of foundational science is extremely interesting, since it necessarily has many exceptionally powerful and important implications for all scientific endeavors—and thus for very substantially improving human well-being in general. We indicate some of these far-reaching scientific implications for math, physics, economics, metaethics, consciousness, and the logically fundamental ontology of moderate realism. Here are some very provocative examples: (1) this system constitutes the ultimate scientific foundation of economics, (2) as Gödel himself hopefully anticipated, his famous incompleteness theorems do not apply to intensional logic, and (3) as Einstein tenaciously maintained, (quantum) physics is ultimately perfectly determinate, even though our data rarely is. We live in truly astounding times—read on!

2. Preface

Finding the provably correct, universal, objective, absolute, core foundations of all science is the supremely important central problem of establishing the genuinely scientific philosophy of science. This has turned out to be a surprisingly tricky and exceptionally challenging problem. It has thwarted countless great scientific and philosophic minds, despite considerable work on it over the last 240 decades or so. (An enormous amount of work was done on this during the 20th century—perhaps as much as in all preceding centuries combined.) There is overwhelming piecemeal evidence that there must be a satisfactory knowable solution to this problem—yet the overwhelming majority of purported solutions fail to withstand close scrutiny, and most seeming close-calls turned out to be wide of the mark or seriously incomplete. Nevertheless, all the essential components of the ultimate solution are publicly available. I’m just reporting on what is already in the world’s vast and fantastic stockpile of technical literature.

There is an interesting problem in recognizing the solution for what it is. There are a variety of widely-held and seemingly-reasonable false-presumptions and false-dichotomies that make the solution seem somewhat counterintuitive for most people. Our situation is analogous to the time of the first scientific revolution, whose heliocentric system seemed counterintuitive given that the sun sure looks like it goes around the earth—indeed we still say the sun “rises” and “sets”.[1] This sort of generally prevailing condition is another reason why it took so long for the solution to finally emerge, and why it’s likely to take a while for it to become fully incorporated into the predominant scientific world view. (These characteristics certainly repeatedly tripped me up as well.)

For purposes of preemptively eliminating and minimizing errors in this project, I’ve very diligently and relentlessly avoided “reinventing the wheel” (or inventing at all, for that matter). However, there was no sufficiently-close precedent of systematic organization that I could directly copy for purposes of reporting the many results I’d gathered elsewhere. So I’ve very likely made a few major blunders in attempting this initial systematic formulation of the solution, including possible errors of misunderstanding and misreporting. However this system contains a sufficient core web of mutually-reinforcing and (previously known-to-be) indisputably-valid components that any major blunders I’ve introduced cannot be ultimately fatal to it, despite whatever substantial revisions are thereby required. Moreover, this system constitutes an exceptionally logically-powerful self-diagnostic (universally reflexive) framework for finding (and fixing) such blunders—so please have at it!

I’ve presented the solution 3 times here, in 3 stages of increasing comprehensiveness and detail. This should make it easier for you to initially learn the basics of this system without getting bogged down in endless details, yet still allows you to subsequently pursue the details if you so choose. Just as importantly, this approach also helps me explicitly formulate my still rather haphazard, fragmentary, and semi-intuitive notions of the solution—this document is an integral part of the overall discovery and development process.

The 1st presentation is the highly schematic overview in the Extended Abstract (page 4). The 2nd presentation is a straightforward Introductory Overview (page 26). The rest of this document is the 3rd presentation, which builds on the 2nd presentation and goes into lots more detail and provides much more background discussion. It’s intended to deal with the many (mostly appropriate) questions to be expected from skeptical (but reasonably open-minded) members of the scientific community. It should also help others (hopefully including you) in “debugging” this document, and to further refine and extend this system. The Descriptive Table of Contents (page 10) is intended as a general outline-overview and synopsis of the 2nd and 3rd presentations.

Although this work is ultimately intended for a scientific audience, I’ve aimed to make this extraordinary news reasonably accessible to interested members of the moderately-educated but non-specialist public. The overwhelming majority of the scientific community effectively falls under this public category anyway, since their specialties are mostly in other areas.

2.1 Other preliminaries.

[You can skip this chapter without missing the main discussion. However, I’d recommend a quick glance through the Typographical conventions subsection (page 7).]

2.1.1 Statement of much-better-than “Fair Use” permission to extensively copy and reuse material from this book.

I want to strongly encourage the production of derivative works. The only thing I require in exchange is some very simple and easy marketing and feedback. You hereby have my explicitly stated permission to incorporate however much of this book you find useful into derivative works, subject to the following 2 very reasonable conditions:

1. You give appropriate and prominent credit in your introduction or preface (whether in a paper, a book, or on the web). That includes providing: my name, the title of this book, a link to the then-current on-line PDF version at my web site (www.athenalab.com), brief mention of the nature and scope of your derivative use of this book, the version (last revision date) of this book (that you extracted from), and a simple statement that I do not endorse your work.

2. You notify me that you are producing such a work (including telling me where interim public-accessible copies of it will be, if any), and you provide me a copy of that work when it’s completed (in electronic, printed, or CD-ROM form).

Contact me by email if you want to get an MS Word doc file for this manuscript. Please include a statement of your planned use.

Good luck!

2.1.2 Typographical conventions.

Since I read and skim large numbers of books and articles, I’m impatient with English that isn’t visually trivial to read and comprehend quickly. This tends to be at odds with the natural tendency of most philosophical writing to involve longer sentences with more qualifiers than does average prose. (This is not an issue of bad writing as such. Splitting up such writing into lots of shorter sentences creates other problems of mental recombination that leads to other sorts of annoying ambiguity.) Many contemporary computer programming languages routinely incorporate typographical devices aimed at making their syntactic structure readily visually evident, so I’ve resorted to some simple and straightforward experimental typographical conventions aimed at addressing this problem. I’ve probably not hit the “sweet spot”, but I’m encouraged that it definitely helps me proofread my (admittedly inelegant) writing. (This should also assist readers for whom English is a second language—one of my secondary concerns that has led me to cut way back on idioms and less-common figures of speech.)

Here are some things I do primarily to facilitate faster and easier reading, especially on computer video displays. I sometimes use “{…}” (curly brackets) to visually group lists or long phrases. (Often I omit the final “and” or “or” from such lists.) Think of curly braces as special parenthesis for non-parenthetical phrases. For example: {Aristotle, Hilbert, Gödel, Mertz} are all {very innovative, philosophically astute, world-class} logicians. Likewise, I sometimes use hyphens to visually-link 1-or-more short-phrases to make it easier-to-read otherwise visually-ambiguous conjunctions of compound-qualifiers (or whatever). I often use parenthesis (rather than commas) for setting off parenthetical phrases. I sometimes (over)use “—” (em dashes, long hyphens) to visually separate the major pieces of long sentences, and in place of “:”s and “;”s (which I like, but which I visually tend to confuse with each other and with “,”s). For simplicity and greater visibility, I use double quotes instead of single quotes—the intended readings should be sufficiently obvious from context.

My footnote policy is to use footnotes for “academic things” that “typical readers” should feel free to ignore. I sometimes use “[…]” (square brackets) to enclose very brief “in-line footnotes”, especially in the References (page 72). [These “in-line footnotes” also indicate important side-comments that you can still feel free to skip over.]

I use the old “medical journal style” of {mnemonic, embedded, parenthetical} references: “Whatever … (Author-last-name, year).” or “Author-last-name(year) says whatever …”.

I use “<<…>>” (double angle brackets, or “super-sized” French quotes) to mark off my “to do” list items for future revisions of this book.