User:KC Panchal/Reflections

This is like my miniblog, where I'd be posting my pet musings. Though they are personal opinions, I believe, of enough significance to appeal to every person.

A lot I write here would be influenced by how I view people in general, and that of course would be dependent upon what few limited experiences I have had in my life, and what kind of people have I met where I live or have lived.

If you have a feedback on what I write here. You are free to discuss it in a dedicated talk page.

Why beat up science?
I come across many people who rejoice in denouncing science. And, that makes me wonder why.

A more fundamental question is “What is science?” While, I’m not into its rigorous definition, this is what I think about science: trying to reason out why and how things are the way they are. Then, be it the mysteries of the Universe, or why a friend of yours behaved erratically. May be for me science is about trying to find a “cause-and-effect” relationship. Observing, thinking, concluding, verifying and knowing for sure—that’s science. Of course, how sound or intricate reasoning that one employs, or is capable of employing vary.

Okay, my take on the subject might have been circumlocutory. But, that brings me back to the basic question of why certain people try to denounce science and resort instead to the occult, supernatural, or paranormal?

Day-to-day life of most people is fairly mundane. We all want some excitement and what better way to get it than coming to know of something that does not normally happen? Something that cannot be explained? Well, that’s exciting, isn’t it? Paranormal phenomena do occur, but it’s important to make sure that they are paranormal in the first place, i.e., cannot be explained on the basis of existing knowledge. This itself requires a spirit of enquiry, which few people possess, and more importantly, the inclination to accept that “may be what could have brought some excitement to my mundane life, in deed, was fairly routine, and so my life, and how I see it are still as mundane”. But, that acceptance is difficult, and quite subconsciously, so. Even after dedicated attempts, if a phenomenon still remains unexplained, it is indeed paranormal, it is beyond scientific explanation. But, for how long? In fact, that’s how science has always progressed. The explanation of what constituted paranormal in the past is what the today’s science textbooks in the schools the world around contain. Be it lightning, diseases, death, life, and the list goes on. Let’s go a step further, and assume that indeed there’d phenomena, which science would NEVER be able to explain; but, what about the things that science has explained so far? Look around yourself: the computer screen you are looking at, the walls that surround you, the food you’d be eating are all products of science. May be applied science. Observing, thinking, concluding, verifying, knowing for sure and putting that knowledge to some purpose—that’s applied science (technology). So, is it right to conclude that science (or even a single given scientific theory for that matter) is useless or falsified just because it could not stand the test of a single occurrence? No, the solution is in trying to come up with another explanation that would account for the occurrence in question, and also for all the occurrences the to-be-discarded-explanation could account for. And, that’s where the usual occult explanations for “paranormal” phenomena fail.

But, occult reasoning is also a reasoning, right? Yes, occult is also a reasoning, but when we say reasoning, reasoning of what nature is very important. Science (or basically, any attempt at explanation), employs two complementary approaches: deductive and inductive. The former involves drawing conclusions from many (or all possible) observations, whereas the latter tries to find a general pattern from a few observations and based on that “pattern”, try to predict an outcome in an unperformed experiment. The hypothesis (“pattern”) is validated if the outcome is as predicted. Thus induction requires a hypothesis. An important quality of a hypothesis is that it should be falsifiable too, when observations contrary to those it predicts can be made. A lot of paranormal explanations are in fact hypothesis, so they indeed deserve a chance to be verified. But, a major problem with such hypotheses is that they merely shift the burden of explanation to another unverified assumption.

To be continued...