What is science?

The purpose of a system is what it does

What is the actual purpose of Science?

Science is concerned with one thing and one thing only: Reality. Truth-stuff

There’s no wiggle room here.

The purpose of Science

The sole, defining and entire raison d’être of science is to better understand and so navigate reality.

Science wants to know truths about how actual reality works and is

so then practical minds can find better creative ways of navigating it and surviving and flourishing in it

or of building complex technocratic centralised control systems of the entire world’s population.

Disgruntled humour at the impending clearing-house technocratic dystopia aside…

To know what is true and real, science has to be founded on the acknowledged fact of something called reality and must rigorously and carefully distinguish

• hard knowledge of this reality, genuine observed witness,

from

• knowledge of stuff which is not real observed “green-stuff” but is constructed in the mind.

There’s nothing wrong with all kinds of imagination of course.

We do well to champion “all four types” of pink stuff (with one specific exception)

Fantasy is healthy when acknowledged as such.

And, there are three other types of non-truth, that can even lead to the discovery of real truths about reality - to green-stuff.

Science fictions are indeed part of the scientific knowledge-base - as long as they are fully acknowledged for what they are - science-fictions - NOT truths.

Official Science is riddled with pseudoscience

Unfortunately

• Some genuine science-fictions are treated - within the mainstream citadel of science and so by the general population - as if they were green-stuff, true statements about reality. This is then brown-stuff: pink-stuff artificially coloured green.

  With a long properly tested veteran-hypothesis this is usually not such a problem - except for the bad habit it induces that allow other more dangerous stories to be accepted as true.

Because

• All manner of pink stuff is treated as truth within the citadel now. Including whole underlying “theories” that spring into vogue and then centrality - without any grounding in a source of scientific validity built on rigorous attempts at falsification.

But much worse!

• Much pure-fantasy stuff, which is neither falsifiable nor verifiable is dragged into the Venn-diagram and treated as if it were a genuine science-fiction and incorporated into the scientific “cannon”.

  There is a technical name for this: pseudoscience. It’s everywhere.

Still getting worser…

• Genuine Falsifiable Science Fictions that have already been falsified are still sitting happily in the cannon!

but we aren’t at maximum worsteressness yet…

• The pseudoscience and the falsified hypotheses are themselves then slipped over from pink to green aswell! To be counted as truth!

Finally we reach the bottom of the worstness…

• These non-science pseudoscience-fantasies and the patently false falsified hypotheses stand proudly as core foundations to entire fields of “knowledge”

How to sweep clean the Augean stables?

A detailed analysis can be done but the root operation is very simple.

Which is it?

The knowledge-base of Science must be cleanly and clearly split at all stages into the two “colour-types”.

Every piece of information in science is either

DATA

an observed witnessing of reality, DATA, “given” to us,

or it is not.

If it is not, it should be made clear that it is not.

It’s a hard fact that Ohm’s law has survived attempts at falsification so often it is a reliable veteran hypothesis.

This fact is green stuff. Describing what invisible stuff “is flowing” is not.

Science-fictions

If it is not DATA, truth and it is still claimed to be science, a representation of reality, then it must be a story / model identified as one of three types:

• Verifiable but not falsifiable:

  “One day, using the same measuring techniques that we call detecting an electron, we will detect a particle of the same mass, but of opposite charge”

  (a “science-prophecy” I suggest)

  THESE SAY WHAT REALITY CAN DO

• Falsifiable but not verifiable

  “If you let go of a cup tomorrow or any day at home and there is nothing in the way it will appear to start accelerating downwards, towards the earth at 9.82 metres per second per second.”

  (A Universal Hypothesis?)

  THESE SAY WHAT REALITY CAN’T DO

• Falsifiable and Verifiable

  “If you throw yoghurt on this hen here it will immediately lay an egg”

  (A science-testable?)

  THESE SAY HOW REALITY IS - WHAT IS THE CASE

Reality rules

In each case it is hard existential green-stuff that either falsifies or verifies the story.

Which is it?

• Truth

• (Falsifiable)Universal Hypothesis

• Science-prophecy

• Science-testable

Pseudoscience

If a story could never be proved or disproved then it has no business calling itself science. Similarly if it could be disproved and has been disproved.

Naive Instrumentalism

The objection may be made that under this framework, claiming electrons exist as separate things is pseudoscience.

Well, let’s be clear it is.

Instrumentalism, as defined by Bohr, basically said:

If we have a model and it seems to work well we may as well take it as truth.

Immediately all sorts of mathematical abstractions resting on flimsy or contradictory data were counted as Truth - as The way things are.

AND

the “objects” these equations dealt with were counted as real things.

Before long…

“We now know that tachyons which pass very near a free Calcium ion in the atmosphere of an exo-planet circling a binary star, causes an instability in its inner electron shell that reduces it’s reactivity by 5.34% for a period of 156.3 nanoseconds.”

Inference became king.

Reversing the implication arrow became acceptable ; the presence of presents could be counted as “proof of Santa”

Aware Instrumentalism

Raw instrumentalism is pseudoscience but there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Aware instrumentalism can make use of invisible untestable foundational imagined structures and things to work out possible real world structures, practical, useful, equations, like Ohm’s law and test them

BUT this is highly fraught with danger. The baby must not be kept WITH any bathwater at all. Instrumentalism can become naive in a flash. Just because the ideas inspired a route to the equations this does not mean they have anything to do with reality in themselves.

Columbo

Unproveable mental constructs, inference, may be useful in reaching a genuine scientific position.

Inference is often an essential imaginative tool for getting to the truth.

Inference may even get Columbo to the killer.

But it means nothing at all in terms of the proof needed to close the case and get a conviction.

It’s not evidence of any kind. Evidence is evidence!

The purpose of a system is what it does

Individual scientists are attempting to do real science. But they are shackled by a system that is not.

Looking at the mainstream citadel of science, the peer-review process, the pHarma capture, the abandoning of the scientific method, the censorship, the grant-driven compulsion, the funding in general, the events of the last 6 years (+), tyranny driven by “consensus” pseudoscience,

applying TPOASIWID I think we can state plainly - something that a look at the origins through Bacon, the occult founders of the Royal Society etc… make less mysterious…

The purpose of the “mainstream citadel of consensus science”

is NOT science.

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With thanks to

Dr Mike Yeadon

esc