hibbsa
2013-02-10 01:41:54 UTC
I have a question for Popper-Deutschians as to whether certain
implications for the 'philosophy of science' arising from a recent
discovery in Network Science is (a) consistent with the philosophy
discussed here and (b) Interesting.
Admittedly it is early days in terms of the developments. But what there
is so far is pretty robust...so it seems worthwhile taking the
supposition these developments go on to firm up as candidate laws.
The discovery is that networks that occur 'naturally' as in they happen
in some sense in time and space, converge toward a single identity at
higher emergent levels. See here for an overview
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-human-brain-internet-cosmology-similar.html
and here for the more detailed proof
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121113/srep00793/full/srep00793.html
The implication dealt with in the report is for a way to much more
rapidly discover the features of networks that only partially undertood.
An actual 'worked example' is provided in that the discovery of a
specific network that would normally have taken a very large amount of
time in a supercomputer, was achieved in a tiny fraction of the time by
assuming the network in question exhibited the higher level regularities
common to all such networks. I don't recall but I think the findings are
then confirmed by the long supercomputer process.
Here's the extra implication to the domain of 'philosphy of science' as
I see it.
It's certainly reasonable and intuitive to expect the history of science
as it occured on the ground could be represented as a network.
Therefore, it seems very plausible that if some future project took
place involving a much more careful revising of what happened, when by
who, with who influences....the resulting network structure, could then
be used in conjunction with the known laws of such networks as mentioned
above, to further 'discover' the regularities, ultimately with the
potential of revealing previously unrealized regularities in play in
knowledge creation.
Regularities which could be very revealing or even definitive as to what
science is, and how it works. Which may well be consistent with the
PopperDeutsch explanation but simply explaining the same thing from a
different direction. Which would of itself be valuable. But also,
possible taking things a lot further.
One advantage of this over the current philosophy, would be its
objective character. Regularities defining science and knowledge
creation, of a mathematical nature, backed up by hard proofs, involving
laws of nature pertaining to networks.
As a further possible aside....if all natural networks have these shared
regularities that actually constrain what forms they can take, would
that be a possible explanation of why human intuition has been sucessful
in - apparently - inducing regularities by considering parochial
'patterns' and 'regularities' (which by the very words inherently have
networy features) ?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
implications for the 'philosophy of science' arising from a recent
discovery in Network Science is (a) consistent with the philosophy
discussed here and (b) Interesting.
Admittedly it is early days in terms of the developments. But what there
is so far is pretty robust...so it seems worthwhile taking the
supposition these developments go on to firm up as candidate laws.
The discovery is that networks that occur 'naturally' as in they happen
in some sense in time and space, converge toward a single identity at
higher emergent levels. See here for an overview
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-human-brain-internet-cosmology-similar.html
and here for the more detailed proof
http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121113/srep00793/full/srep00793.html
The implication dealt with in the report is for a way to much more
rapidly discover the features of networks that only partially undertood.
An actual 'worked example' is provided in that the discovery of a
specific network that would normally have taken a very large amount of
time in a supercomputer, was achieved in a tiny fraction of the time by
assuming the network in question exhibited the higher level regularities
common to all such networks. I don't recall but I think the findings are
then confirmed by the long supercomputer process.
Here's the extra implication to the domain of 'philosphy of science' as
I see it.
It's certainly reasonable and intuitive to expect the history of science
as it occured on the ground could be represented as a network.
Therefore, it seems very plausible that if some future project took
place involving a much more careful revising of what happened, when by
who, with who influences....the resulting network structure, could then
be used in conjunction with the known laws of such networks as mentioned
above, to further 'discover' the regularities, ultimately with the
potential of revealing previously unrealized regularities in play in
knowledge creation.
Regularities which could be very revealing or even definitive as to what
science is, and how it works. Which may well be consistent with the
PopperDeutsch explanation but simply explaining the same thing from a
different direction. Which would of itself be valuable. But also,
possible taking things a lot further.
One advantage of this over the current philosophy, would be its
objective character. Regularities defining science and knowledge
creation, of a mathematical nature, backed up by hard proofs, involving
laws of nature pertaining to networks.
As a further possible aside....if all natural networks have these shared
regularities that actually constrain what forms they can take, would
that be a possible explanation of why human intuition has been sucessful
in - apparently - inducing regularities by considering parochial
'patterns' and 'regularities' (which by the very words inherently have
networy features) ?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]