Re: Thomas Covenant series


Zeborah wrote:
Rich Weyand <weyand@xxxxxxx> wrote:

[the Sokal hoax]
I thought the quote from the paper, "physical 'reality' ... is at bottom a
social and linguistic construct", was pretty much on point for some of the
arguments.

I haven't noticed anyone here saying anything like that, and I haven't
said anything like that.

I'd be happy with the claim that truth is a linguistic construct (I
squee'd when Rorty said it) but I don't think reality and truth are the
same thing. "The Earth goes more or less around the Sun" is true. "The
Sun" isn't true, and the Sun isn't true. Only sentences are true, and
sentences are a linguistic construct. Ergo....

The Sun, however, is in all likelihood quite real, and I don't think
physical reality is a social and linguistic construct. --Not most of
it, anyway.

Mind you, "physical reality" is a linguistic construct, a selection of
letters mostly originating somewhere round the East Mediterranean and
formed into a couple of words of Latin descent. Rather as Tolkien's
Ents (ObSF) said about "hill", it's titchy as a description of the
universe and everything, not to mention life. (The Chinese and Arabs
and others must have similar phrases that mean about the same but look
and sound different. But that's not important right now.)

As for "truth" and "reality", I'd say they are synonyms only in the
trivial form "It is true [that the Sun is round]" and "It is a reality
[that the Sun is round]".

Otherwise a useful if obvious distinction can be made:

1) Reality is just what is, the mysterious, even ineffable, universe
that has been fizzing away for trillions of our Earth-minutes and will
go on for zillions more, doing whatever it does irrespective of whether
any intelligent entity (like us) grows up and says anything about it.

2) Truth (or otherwise, such as falsehood, error &c), on the other
hand, only comes along when intelligent entities _say_ things about
stuff. What we say about things does not constitute reality per se, it
is symbols, metaphors, words, sounds, equations, marks, ideas, maps -
all groping towards some kind of description of the macro and the micro
in different ways. And since Heisenberg had trouble with a single
particle, it seems unlikely we can come to a complete and true grokking
of the universe.

As humans - or cats - we don't need Newton's theory of gravity to avoid
falling off cliffs and being hit by a train, though it may be a more
useful and precise description (or metaphor, or abstraction) of what is
going on at some level of reality and for certain groups of people
(like rocket scientists navigating to the Moon, who don't need to know
about quantum stuff).

People can have all sorts of wrong or incomplete theories about the
world and still live in it practically. Clearly, a neanderthal could
see the world and operate in it without knowing about quarks or DNA or
the detailed biochemistry of posionous plants. Someone who believes the
world was created in 4004 BC and operates in an Aristotelian way is
perfectly able to walk about, see trees, avoid sunburn, buy food and
catch a ball.

In fact, I'd suggest that almost no professional cricket players have a
theoretical grasp of Newton's gravity or Einstein's spacetime and that
thinking overmuch about it would be counterproductive when they're
trying to pouch a skier, much like contemplating the biomechanics of
your knee while running down the stairs. Conversely, I can imagine a
brilliant theorist of ballistics might be useless at running around and
catching a ball.

Personally, I like to keep "truth" and "science" separate, though this
is a slightly different form of truth (Truth). Science I see as a
fascinating muddling about in the garden of reality, a process of
trying to describe stuff and develop and test the implications thereof,
a groping that tries to shine lights on physical reality but will never
get the whole picture.

Some people whinge that science and/or scientists is/are always
disagreeing about stuff - global warming, eating fats and dairy, dark
matter, nuclear power and the origin of the universe. To me that's
good. If you want Absolute Truth and Certainty, go to some religion,
cult or strict ideology and believe in that. And there are hundreds or
thousands of truths to choose from! Take gravity. We know something
about gravity, of course, but we don't really know how it works. As The
Onion puts it ( http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512 )
"Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are
now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and
they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling."

Science as we do it is necessarily a social and linguistic process as
well as whatever else it is. Science takes place, like any other human
endeavour, in some economic, industrial, social, theoretical milieu or
other, and scientists are brainy, vain, humble, charming, aggressive,
retiring empire-builders much like everyone else. What is meant by a
hypothesis, a proof, a valid test, a repeatable experiment, a fraud, a
hoax, the desirability of peer review, an accurate instrument, a system
of measurements, a series of mistakes and the implications and
consequences one can draw from some observation, experimental result or
calculation all has to be agreed socially for science to work.

As for ObSfComposition relevance.... there's plenty in this sort of
thing for stories about conceptual breakthroughs, conspiracy theories
and "is this real or VR?". Philip K *** for one... if I remember _The
Penultimate Truth_ correctly, the heroes break through one layer of
untruth they've been told and think they now know the real deal, but we
the readers know they are still operating under a misapprehension
(hence the title) - and maybe we are as well. Dan Galouye did some
conceptual breakthrough novels, like _Dark Universe_ and _Counterfeit
World_. Priest's _Inverted World_. Heinlein's _Orphans of the Sky_ and
a nice inversion of that, Ballard's "Thirteen to Centaurus" (in which
people think they are on a starship but in fact are in a lab, in a kind
of Big Brother experiment).

--
Nick

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