Thread

Thought of the day. When I read the Ancient Greeks, I am filled with admiration. Euclid, Democritus, Epicurus, Plato, and Aristotle were all remarkable thinkers. And yet in my experience, modern people love to poke fun at the ancient Greeks, Plato and Aristotle in particular. It seems that people consider scholastic philosophy impotent, especially compared to modern Science. In particular, people believe that Plato and Aristotle were "armchair" thinkers/rationalists who never looked at the outside world, and so aren't worth engaging with.

But this perspective is untrue. I don't want to fixate on this point, but I will briefly try and make it. I will start with Aristotle, who made extensive biological observations. He systemized Marine Biology. In fact, he was practically the founder of zoology. Darwin himself said his "two gods" were Linnaeus and Cuvier, but they were "mere school-boys to old Aristotle". As far as physics, it is considerably more complicated. However, first think of the common refrain: "Aristotle thought heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects!" This is obviously wrong, right?

Is it? The natural world (that Aristotle observed) is not a vacuum. Air resistance is a thing. So, the medium an object is falling through matters. Heavier objects do empirically fall faster than lighter objects, in many cases. That is perfectly consistent with Newton's theory of gravitation. (The irony here is that Newton transcended Aristotle not by looking at the world, but by not just looking at the world.) Anyway, I would argue the reason that Aristotlean mechanics persisted was not because of dogma, but because it explained the world with some empirical consistency (i.e. it compressed many datapoints with some reasonable amount of accuracy). On this point, some more reading is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

Another example: something like the idea that there are "four elements"--earth, water, air, fire--is ridiculed. But what are these four "elements", but phases of matter! Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma...

Now onto Plato. Yes, Plato thinks true knowledge only comes from understanding the Forms. Our material impressions are illusory, and all that. And it's true, a potential objection: isn't the world "out there" also important for our knowledge? Don't we need to experiment, to look at the world?

Yes. The thing, though, is that Plato never denied empiricism. Datapoints from the world were part of his process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy_of_the_divided_line

To be precise, Plato used "understanding" to mean something more like "certain knowledge". And he didn't think empirical datapoints rose to that standard. But then, isn't that just how scientists today think about empirical knowledge -- a matter of probability, rather than a logical certainty, ensured by the rigor of a formal system?! As Einstein said: "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." I think this idea is similar to what Plato believed.

Anyways. All that said, I think people like to slam the Greeks as a way to signal their fidelity to Science. And I find it distasteful. My view is: the Greeks knew a lot, reflected deeply, and ultimately, their ideas weren't so idiotic. What is the actual point of this post, though?

I have a prediction. In a few hundred years, the pursuit of truth will (hopefully) have advanced significantly further. And what do I think will happen? We will have new methods. They come into existence every once in a while; I would say that the "controlled experiment" is one "method", and one that characterizes science in particular. A modern example: Computer simulations are one new way (New Kind, perhaps) of doing science. My prediction, then, is: at some point, the emphasis on observation or experiment will change. Some things--electrons--aren't so easy to "directly observe", whatever that means. If measurement changes the system, will science, which depends on measurement, need new methods?

To me, science pursues this: the ability to measure, predict, compress, and control the world. This adds up to "understanding" the world (or is my summation incomplete?). There are many ways of doing this, though, and I would be shocked if we've even scratched the surface. AI, for example, will probably open new avenues, new ways of understanding the world. And they will be able to achieve things that past methods could not.

My expectation: someday, people will slander contemporary scientists just the same way people today slander ancient philosophers. "Can you believe they tried to observe electrons through experiment? What idiots! They should have just created a miniverse with giant (scale-invariant?) electrons, then experienced firsthand what it's like to be an electron! That's how we do it, today! Isn't it an obvious method? Science is dead." Something like that, at least.

In any event, this gripe doesn't really matter. There is a lot more to do. Still, I think people should respect how far we've come. And I bet our ways of obtaining truth today will look limited, or even ridiculous, from the hindsight of year 3000 -- if we're still here, that is.

Galileo and Einstein were geniuses, just as Aristotle and Plato were. And I will always think it's fascinating, even useful, to understand how previous greats made it happen, even (especially) before they had all the same tools (by I which mean not only technologies, but methods of inquiry). It's hard to pursue truth. I respect all who do it.