Ray,

Owing to hurricane Irene, I will be in the air at the time of this week's meeting.  Please go ahead without me.

Peter

On Aug 30, 2011, at 7:57 PM, Ray F. Cowan wrote:

> Hi Gentlemen,
> 
> This week we'll hold our LQS meeting on Thursday, September 1, at 2:00 PM 
> Eastern.  We'll take round-table reports and discuss Chapter 1 of the book
> Peter mentioned last week: David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity."
> 
> Here are some quotes from Chapter 1 that I found interesting (there were
> many more):
> 
> "How do we know? One of the most remarkable things about science is the 
> contrast between the enormous reach and power of our best theories and 
> the precarious, local means by which we create them."
> 
> "Scientific explanations are about reality, most of which does not consist 
> of anyone\u2019s experiences."
> 
> "Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity."
> 
> "Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived 
> from anything: they have to be guessed \u2013 after which they can be 
> criticized and tested."
> 
> "But the real key to science is that our explanatory theories -- which 
> include those interpretations -- can be improved, through conjecture, 
> criticism and testing."
> 
> "To this day, most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that 
> knowledge is some form of justified, true belief, where 'justified' 
> means designated as true (or at least 'probable') by reference to some 
> authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge."
> 
> "The opposing position -- namely the recognition that there are no 
> authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying 
> ideas as being true or probable -- is called fallibilism."
> 
> "Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to
> contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so they are predisposed 
> to try to change them for the better."
> 
> "The quest for authority led empiricists to downplay and even stigmatize 
> conjecture, the real source of all our theories."
> 
> "Thus, although scientific theories are not derived from experience, they 
> can be tested by experience -- by observation or experiment."
> 
> "Instrumentalism is one of many ways of denying realism, the commonsense, 
> and true, doctrine that the physical world really exists, and is accessible 
> to rational inquiry."
> 
> "Just as conflicting predictions are the occasion for experiment and 
> observation, so conflicting ideas in a broader sense are the occasion for 
> all rational thought and inquiry."
> 
> "Good explanations are often strikingly simple or elegant."
> 
> "The best explanations are the ones that are most constrained by existing 
> knowledge -- including other good explanations as well as other knowledge 
> of the phenomena to be explained."
> 
> "Now we shall see how this explanation-based conception of science answers 
> the question that I asked above: how do we know so much about unfamiliar 
> aspects of reality?"
> 
> "The theory [axis-tilt of the Earth] reaches out, as it were, from its finite
> origins inside one brain that has been affected only by scraps of patchy 
> evidence from a small part of one hemisphere of one planet -- to infinity. 
> This reach of explanations is another meaning of 'the beginning of infinity'.
> It is the ability of some of them to solve problems beyond those that they 
> were created to solve."
> 
> "Realism The idea that the physical world exists in reality, and that 
> knowledge of it can exist too."
> 
> "The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our 
> knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism. We create theories by 
> rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the 
> intention of improving upon them."
> 
> "Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same 
> logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The 
> universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. 
> The bigger the better."
> 
> "But they certainly do not experience such reflections as a result. I
> mention this because I often hear scientific research described in rather 
> a bleak way, suggesting that it is mostly mindless toil."
> 
> "After all, computers play chess mindlessly -- by exhaustively searching the 
> consequences of all possible moves -- but humans achieve a similar-looking 
> functionality in a completely different way, by creative and enjoyable 
> thought."
> 
> As usual, our call-in number the local ReadyTalk access number for your 
> country (US: 866-740-1260, or check www.readytalk.com).  Access code 
> is 3144955.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> --Ray
>