Chapter I: Cosmos And Chaos | The Philosophy Of Science [1st Edition]

        “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

        – Carl Sagan^I

        “What follow are arguments directed at people who care about arguments.”

        – Steven Pinker^II

        Before one can even attempt a productive philosophy, they have to believe, no, understand, that there is a world out there to know, and a valid way of knowing it.  This is of course evident.  Any honest person recognizes regularities in the world: in the seasons, in people's behaviors and in their reactions to similar situations, and in the very fact that dropped things fall down.  Only a madman could deny that there exists something to know and understand.  (And beware: there do indeed exist madmen, see “Appendix I: Psuedo-Science And Anti-Science”).  Otherwise, such a person must be suspected of dishonesty in the pursuit of some ulterior motive.  Such an individual (or group) is not engaged in science, but they may be engaged in social engineering.  When pressed, those that claim that reality (if they admit to its existence) is a chaos rather than a cosmos will necessarily retreat to making appeals to reason against reason; logic against coherence; and citing empirical evidence against empiricism.^III  It is quite clear that such sophistry is nothing short of anti-philosophy (and indeed, anti-science).  There is a philosophical project out there: a real reality to discover and understand.

        In fact, (as we will explore later in the “Psychology” chapter of the “Ontology” section) we evolved (evolution being itself a real, regular process by which biodiversity is generated) minds as pattern-recognizers precisely because the world is so regular and predictable in so many ways.  If it weren't, not only would we not have been able to evolve, but it wouldn't have increased our fitness to have any sense organs at all, let alone a higher brain designed to recognize and exploit patterns in its environment.  A capricious, random world, a chaos, would have no structure, and anyway, no one to notice it (the human brain is the most complex, structured object we know of in the universe^IV).  The fact that so many people seem to use their brain to claim that the world is not regular is evidence only of error, and of the fact that understanding the world is not a trivially easy thing to do.  This stance should be seen as a throwing of the hands up, an abjection of duty, not a serious (let alone enlightened) argument.

        This book is about the correct philosophy for understanding the cosmos, the philosophy of science.  The only mistake astronomer and philosopher of science Carl Sagan made when writing on such topics was to say that science is a way of knowing.^V  It is the way of knowing.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See Cosmos by Sagan (pp. 1).

II. See Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress by Steven Pinker (Penguin Books) (2018) (pp. 349).

III. See Enlightenment Now by Pinker (pp. 351-352). My brother, the musician Jake Gussman, specifically pointed out the absurd attempt by such people to empirically falsify empiricism in response to the general criticism of their use of “science” to undermine science.

IV. Artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Ray Kurzweil quotes Nobel-prize-winning biologist James D. Watson as saying as much, see How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil (Penguin Books) (2012) (pp. 8-9, 285) which further cites Watson's foreword to Discovering The Brain by Sandra Ackerman (National Academies Press) (1992) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234155/) (though I have read the foreword, I have not read this book, which is freely available at the preceding hyperlink).

V. For some examples, see the following three (otherwise excellent!) quotes: on goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/962093-science-is-more-than-a-body-of-knowledge-it-is#:~:text=It%20is%20a%20way%20of,fine%20understanding%20of%20human%20fallibility); Brainy Quote (https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/carl_sagan_124576); and Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/345299496406982396/). I do not believe Sagan actually believed there were valid alternative “ways of knowing”, so I am not sure why he used “a” instead of “the”.