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From: fostel@ncsu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: RE: Physics and Intuition
Message-ID: <2367@ncsu.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Oct-83 10:16:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: ncsu.2367
Posted: Wed Oct 12 10:16:26 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Oct-83 21:31:43 EDT
Lines: 48



    I intend this to be my final word on the matter.  I intned it to be
    brief: as someone said, a bit more tolerance won this group would help.
    From Laura we have a wonderful story of the intermeshing of physics and
    religion.  Well, I picked molecular physics for its avoidance of any
    normal life experiences.  Cosmology and creation are not in that catagory
    quite so strongly because religion is a everyday thing and will lead to
    biases in cocmological theories.  Clearly there is a continueum from
    things which are divorced from everyday experience to those that are
    very tightly connected to it.  My point is that most "hard" sciences
    are at one end of the continueum while psychology is clearly way over
    at the other end, by definition.  It is my position that the rather
    big difference between the way one can think about the two ends of the
    spectrum suggests that what works well at one end may well be quite
    inappropriate at the other.  Or it may work fine.  But there is a burden
    of proof that I hand off to the rational psychologists before I will
    take them more seriously than I take most psychologists.  I have the same
    attitude towrads cosmology. I find it patently ludicrous that so many
    people push our limited theories so far outside the range of applicability
    and expect the extrapolation to be accurate. Such extrapoloation is
    an interesting way to understand the failing of the theoies, but to
    believe that DOES require faith without substantiation.

    I dislike being personal, but Laura is trying to make it serem black and
    white.  The big bang has hardly been proved. But she seems to be saying
    it has.  It is of course not so simple. Current theories and data
    seem to be tipping the scales, but the scales move quite slowly and will
    no doubt be straitenned out by "new" work 30 years hense.

    The same is true of my point about technical reasoning.  Clearly no
    thought can be entirely divorced from life experiences without 10
    years on a mountain-top.  Its not that simple.  That doesn't mean that
    there are not definable differnces between different way of thinking
    and that some may be more suitable to some fields.  Most psychologists
    are quite aware of this problem (I didn't make it up) and as a result
    purely experimental psychology has always been "trusted" more than
    theorizing without data.  Hard numbers give one some hope that it is
    the world, not your relationship with a pet turtle speaking in your
    work.

    If anyone has anymore to say to me about this send me mail, please.
    I suspect this is getting tiresom for most readers. (its getting
    tiresome for me...)  If you quote me or use my name, I will always
    respond.  This network with its delays is a bad debate forum.  Stick to
    ideas in abstration from the proponent of the idea. And please look
    for what someone is trying to say before assuming thay they are blathering.
    ----GaryFostel----