Science: the avoidance of delusion

It’s high time science got back on course. The Citadel has been utterly overrun with fairy stories, pseudoscience, fallacies... But the situation is very easily solved.

Introduction

It’s a tall claim:

One ridiculously simple change and science can be rescued, sanity can be restored, tyranny can be made impossible and unnecessary suffering can be minimised.

An insane and grandiose sounding notion.

I’m not offering anything new.

Nor something old, that has stood the test of time, and has been wrought into focus after a long life of harsh experience.

Quite the reverse.

I feel more like a quizzical child pointing with mild bafflement at an Emperor dressed in his ‘finery’ saying what is obvious.

“That is not true. That is just a story”

Everybody gets it already… or suffering inevitably follows

There is literally only one simple idea in this whole lengthy post - one a very very small child can easily understand.

Indeed, it’s one of the first things every child learns. We were all encouraged to learn it.

This was an unnecessary measure for each of us because we would have learnt it anyway.

The idea is so important, so central and so fundamentally essential to survival.

Without taking this distinction fully on board we could not get through the day.

The exact extent to which we get this skill wrong in every day life correlates pretty well to the amount we come a cropper. We ignore it at our peril.

It involves distinguishing truth from stories.

It is the fundamental underpinning of every attempt to see what is real.

It IS the attempt to see what is real!

It’s the key part of being sane.

It’s the key part of being scientific.

Yet the Citadel of Science has long abandoned it.

Distinguishing Truth from Stories

This is the root understanding of all understandings.

All understanding has two aspects:

1. building useful representations / maps of reality in our imaginations.

2. Knowing very clearly the difference between those created representations and reality itself.

The second is the root skill and the more important of the two.

It began at birth and has grown ever deeper with every experience, in every sentient being.

It’s a basic distinction.

It cuts away delusion. It’s the sword of scepticism.

It’s the core of what all genuine science is woven from.

In Solvay, 1927 the Citadel gave it the push.

It’s as if Nick Cave was given the push from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Or oranges were left out of Orangina.

The Science Question

The very root of doing all real science is one question: The Science Question

“Are you sure that is true?

or is it just a story?”

It could be called The Scepticism Question. In the many coloured pictures coming up, scepticism is shown as a black line. It separates the two worlds.

The honesty of scepticism

Here they are then; these two clear non-overlapping categories of reports on reality.

We teach to every child the utmost fundamental importance of clearly understanding the difference between these two.

(Cue a long discussion on play, make-believe and how these ideas are only understood by us after having performed them ambiguously for a while)

Growing both of the
two categories
whilst never ever
mixing them up
is what Science is.

Yet the Citadel of Science™️ has been weaving a messy tapestry, a representation of reality woven out of both stories and hard witness with no clear separation as to which is which.

The Citadel of Science™️ has not been doing science for a while.

Science is brilliant

Science is absolutely brilliant. Real science is unfailingly a good thing. By definition! Why?

Because Science, Real Science is only about one thing: carefully building up and keeping clearly separate two very different stores of stuff.

1. An ever-growing store of Science-Facts. The DATA. All true

2. An ever changing store of Science-Fancy. The MODELLING. None of it true, but all of it capable of leading to truth.*

*(For example a universal hypothesis either receives falsifying DATA or there is a set of failed falsification attempts)

The definition of science

For many years my own preferred definition of science was one slightly adapted from Richard Feynman:

Science: organised scepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.

A classy definition that puts scepticism dead centre and gives no weight to expert received ‘wisdom’. It seems to totally embody The Science Question:

“Are you sure that is true?  or is it just a story?”

but there a few issues with it:

1. Surely someone alone on an island can behave scientifically?

2. Maybe even lip-service to the notion of ‘experts’ is a BAD IDEA.

3. It doesn’t sound as if it is offering something positive to help; just pointing out when others are wrong.

4. I found that when sharing this definition (I was a funny kid) my excitement was often returned by glazed looks; it’s quite a mouthful and needs unpacking.

Is there a simpler definition that misses nothing? Easier to grasp?

There is. There are.

Science: never pretending to know what you don’t.

i.e. not mistaking pink stuff for green stuff

Or equivalently:

The Best Definition of Science

Science: the avoidance of delusion

Because what is delusion?

Delusion: confusing stories for reality, MODELs for DATA

Confusing pink for green, making brown.

Another word for delusion is certainty.

Belief (as in ‘Certain Belief that a story is true’) is another word.

I used to call my endeavour: Beyond Belief but since people often use ‘belief’ to include high probability as well as certainty I now call it:

Beyond Certainty

Certainty = Delusion: we need get beyond it.

The Evolution of Delusion

The seminal 2024 documentary, The Evolution Of Delusion, short-listed for the Blakespeare Prize makes everything clear.

From the Panel’s announcements…

“The Evolution of Delusion far surpasses any of West’s other documentaries in both breadth, scope, depth and palette. Although, at times, quite dense in concept, this density is more than balanced by the overall scarcity of excesses and the unarguably stern constraint of flourish in West’s directing. The importance of the film’s central message shines clear. Nobody could dare call this a polished documentary. The musical sound-track has been nominated for this year’s Colloid . It’s a very questionable use of retro-irony which somehow succeeds in hammering home the central point all the more. Which side of the line is it? A question we must always ask.”

The two mutually exclusive worlds of ‘knowledge’

Distinguishing clearly between these two worlds is precisely what science is. It is what sanity is.

Any confusion between these two and science is lost, sanity is lost.

It is therefore fruitful to colour these two radically different worlds in order to clearly distinguish them.

The former I shall call Green Stuff.

The latter I shall call Pink Stuff.

They are separated by the black line of scepticism, doubt, sanity.

These colours are quite appropriate as we shall see.

Green stuff is reality.

DATA: that which is GIVEN to us, experience.

Pink Stuff is imagination, models, maps, fantasy, abstractions, hypotheses, theories

Stories. These are things WE make.

Hard scepticism. Is it really true green?

Great care is needed to separate:

true experience which is Green Stuff - (let us call it upstream data)

from

interpreted experience - (downstream data) that has been transformed, abstracted through a story / model (Pink Stuff) so that it becomes itself Pink Stuff, a story - something that is not truth.

This is the defining difference between the two worlds

Green Stuff is truth. Pink Stuff is not truth. It’s just stories.

Green Stuff is what we know because we experienced it, observed it, witnessed it.

It is given to us to witness - for real.

Hard Scepticism

The Simulation Possibility* makes it clear that without Hard Scepticism we leave ourselves open to delusion.

Some key words on both sides

We can call Green Stuff : Terrain - as opposed to Pink Stuff : Brain. This interpretation makes sense of the colours.

We may call it reality as opposed to fantasy / imagination.

Varieties of Pink Stuff

Pure fantasy

Anything can be pictured or imagined. And why not.

Science-fancy

Some types of story may be termed science-fancy, because they claim to be talking about representing hard reality and are capable of leading to knowledge, truth.

This is Pink Stuff that can lead us to Green Stuff. Stories that help us find truth. Like fresh leads or ‘aha!’ moments in Columbo.

There are three types

Science-Prophecies

The stories may be verifiable: existential prophecies that may one day be shown true that can never be shown false.

Universal Hypotheses

The stories are falsifiable restrictions on reality, universal hypotheses that say some things can’t happen and can be shown false but can never be shown true.

Checkable facts

The stories may be both verifiable or falsifiable. Simple, existential pieces of unknown DATA to gather. “There’s thirty-two avocados in the fridge.”

There is one more category of stories that claim to be talking about representing hard reality.

These are the stories which are neither verifiable nor falsifiable.

These are not Science-fancies at all. These are:

Pseudoscience fantasies

Pseudoscience fantasies can never lead to knowledge or truth but they pretend to either do so or even to be actual Green Stuff themselves!

Nothing in reality can affect them. Nothing can disprove them or establish them. They are pure story.

They are no different from any other fantasy. They are pure pink. So why the brown outline?

With no way of demonstrating any connection between these stories and reality, they are invariably just taken as reality as they claim!

When we put Pink Stuff in the green area or Green Stuff in the pink area we get Brown Stuff. Bull shit. Delusion.

More words on Science-Prophecies

A story that is not falsifiable, but it is verifiable, may be called a science prophecy. Something that may be proved true by an existential example but can never be proved false.

An example of this might be

It is possible for a dog to understand Virgil.

Clearly there is no way of proving this false. Such a dog may turn up tomorrow.

But it IS possible to prove it true. Adequate testing may show that this dog has a strong grasp of Virgil.

Another science prophecy:

Measurements will be made that show or imply the existence of a positively charged particle which is in all other respects, the same as an electron. This is not to say the electron exists (that’s another conversation) but the prophecy is that the methods we currently use to detect an electron will one day detect a charged particle with the same mass as an electron, but with a positive charge equal and opposite to the charge on an electron.

This prophecy came true. No amount of time could have proved it false.

More words on Universal Hypotheses

These are stories that can never be proved true but can be proved false. They are falsifiable and not verifiable. These are the most important stories in science because they generate the most interesting type of Green Stuff.

Decidables and Prophecies can produce simple facts.

The only Green Stuff we can gather from a falsifiable unverifiable hypothesis is the number and types of attempts made to try and prove it false.

A huge folder of observations cluster around this pink story - all quality Green Stuff.

When a story has been tested at the coalface of reality over and over by many people, in many ways, when it has survived all attempts at falsification we are left with - what may be termed - a veteran hypothesis, or a theory.

A falsifiable hypothesis is promoted to a veteran hypothesis, or a theory if significant attempts have been made repeatedly to falsify it, all of which have failed.

Can the veteran hypothesis ever be true?

NO!

it is inherently unverifiable by way of it being unbounded in space and / or time - a falsification may be found at any minute.

It is just a map that that has so far never failed us.

Prophecies / Hypotheses - inversions of each other

Two types: science prophecy and the universal hypothesis are mirrors of each other and are indeed equivalent. For every falsifiable hypothesis there is an equivalent science prophecy and for every science prophecy there is an equivalent universal hypothesis.

One says an existential example will be found, the other says no such examples exist.

For example, the statement

It is possible for a dog to be able to speak and understand Latin

is a science prophecy, it can never be proved false. Such a dog may appear any minute and if Yuval Harari and Elon Musk have anything to do with it, it may well occur.

The equivalent falsifiable hypothesis to the science prophecy:

Latin-speaking dogs are a thing!

is the falsifiable hypothesis

It is not possible for a dog to speak Latin.

On particular occasions. It may be more useful to concentrate on the science prophecy side of the equation and on others, it may be more useful to focus on the falsifiable hypothesis side of equation, perhaps depending on the likelihood of an existential example, being found.

Prophecy or Hypothesis?

The following has proved a fantastic map so far. It is a veteran hypothesis.

Bricks fall under normal circumstances, when dropped from above the surface of the Earth.

As it seems most unlikely that a counter example to this falsifiable hypothesis will be found this makes a more useful map than the equivalent Science-Prophecy

Some ordinary bricks float sometimes in air.

Of course individual scientists may disagree strongly and consider this Science-Prophecy to be much more interesting.

The main thing to note is that we can ALWAYS apply the Simulation Possibility*. It is not impossible that we are being fed information as if in a computer game and that tomorrow EVERYTHING may change.

We DO NOT KNOW if bricks will fall tomorrow or even in the next few seconds. We can never know because it is Pink Stuff. It can never be true.

We only know they haven’t so far.

How to mend science

There is nothing wrong with Pink Stuff as long as it is known and understood to be Pink Stuff. Pink Stuff is very useful in generating Green Stuff and in generating models, maps, abstractions, hypotheses that help to navigate the real Terrain

The only errors are mistaking Green Stuff for Pink Stuff.

The above documentary The Evolution Of Delusion shows this error going right to left, with story treated as DATA - ending up with Brown Stuff in the Green.

Dr JW and AJ and others particularly call attention to this error going the other way.

When data (green) is described as being a theory (pink), this is also delusion (Brown Stuff), whether deliberate, or accidental.

Brown Stuff in the Pink is as bad as in the Green.

Science is mended by always keeping the truth / story distinction clear.

The solution:

Colour-code all scientific documents

Every phrase in a paper or study is either green or pink or brown.

Nothing wrong with Pink Stuff. But colour it properly.

If it is green there must be sources to demonstrate this.

If the paper settles something then the conclusions section will be green.

If it turns out to have no establishing provenance, if it is actually only Pink Stuff being taken as Green Stuff then it is Brown Stuff.

Bullshit.