So I was reading a little piece about what they gave the Nobel Prize in…

So I was reading a little piece about what they gave the Nobel Prize in physics for. Well, they gave it for demonstrating the quantum tunneling effect on a macro scale. Which, basically, isn’t the first time quantum effects have been found at a macro scale, but in the pop-sci crowd it spread like “oh wow, soon we’ll be watching cats that are ‘both dead and alive’.” But our text isn’t about that. In the overall slice of quantum-mech news it reminded me of an article (they even mentioned it recently, specifically in the context of this Nobel thing, on n+1)

Karl Popper, *Three Views Concerning Human Knowledge*. (http://www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/cursos/cst-311/popper_threeviews.pdf)

The guy was basically into philosophy of science, I recommend reading him. So this particular note introduced three concepts of scientific knowledge. It’s all about how quantum mechanics is so convenient and works so well, but where the limits of its applicability are — nobody really understands.

1/ Essentialism (ultimate explanation by essences)
2/ Instrumentalism (theories as instruments)
3/ C
ritical realism (conjectures, truth and reality)

Essentialism (Aristotle):
1/ The goal of science is to know the deep essence of things
2/ You’ve learned the essence, now it should preferably explain everything
3/ Belief in an ultimate explanation is essential: one day we’ll reach a level where there’s nothing left to explain, because we found the “true nature” of the object

Critique:
1/ Found it and called it a day — kinda meh as a concept
2/ Even if we accidentally guessed the real “essence,” we can’t prove it or check it repeatedly because any theory remains a hypothesis

Instrumentalism:
1/ Theories are a set of tools, an “abacus,” or algorithms for predicting observations
2/ The question “is the theory true?” is considered either meaningless or secondary; what matters is how well it stamps out predictions
3/ Tests are everything, it works значит збс

Critique:
1/ Instrumentalism can’t explain the success of science: why do theories made just as “tools” have such astonishing generality and precision?
2/ If it works, I don’t give a damn how or what it asserts, this theory — a dangerous effect in science (self-satisfaction and lack of connection to the real world)

Conjectures, truth and reality
1/ The goal of science remains: to give a true (or close-to-true) description of the world; we stay realists
2/ But: we can never be sure we’ve reached the truth; at best we can show pretty reliably that some theories are kinda crap overall (don’t work)
3/ Theories are bold hypotheses (conjectures): very informative guesses about the world that can’t be finally verified, but can be seriously tested and you can try to refute them
4/ There is no “final level of reality”: any level can be explained by a more general theory;

And now my main question: doesn’t this remind you of anything? AI? Deep learning?

Review finished (part two later).