Of Clocks and Clouds: Reality in the Digital Age

This video is not meant to invalidate materialism or the current methods of scientific explorations. It is instead intended as an exploration of those methods.

Karl Popper famously distinguished between two possible types of scientific systems of complexity: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be elegantly solved through reduction. (Think, for instance, of planetary orbits, which can be explained with gravitational equations.) A cloud, on the other hand, is utter epistemic chaos and disorder; as Popper put it, they are "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." After all, clouds are carried and crafted by infinities of currents; they seethe and tumble in the air, and are a little different with every moment in time. [The fact that fractals can give us a mathematical way to envision this chaos does not negate the epistemic chaos here. Fractals just go a little way to make the chaos comprehensible.]

As Popper himself said of total predictability as the goal of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, which he defines as "scientific determinism":

The doctrine that the state of any closed physical system can be predicted, even from within the system, with any specified degree of precision, by deducing the prediction from theories, in conjunction with initial conditions whose required degree of precision can always be calculated (in accordance with the principle of accountability) if the prediction task is given. ("The Open Universe," Karl Popper, page 36).

Nonlinear models and chaos have made determinism unreachable if we employ the criteria of total predictability.
The question, of course, is whether the universe (and all the life contained therein) is a clock or a cloud. The methodology of modern science is predicated on the assumption that everything is a clock, a wonderfully complex timepiece to be sure, but still a clock. But what if reality is a cloud? Is reductionism still valid? Or are best solved through simple observation, induction and ad hoc theorizing? Of course, that's how science was done in the 19th century but maybe that's our future?

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Science & Technology

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• Karl Popper
• Of Clocks and Clouds
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[cheeseylemon]

The default Windows videos? Really? lol

[2bsirius]

@cheeseylemon

Windows movie maker had a great program just at the end of Vista. It has some great music. It had lots of options. THEN they discontinued the whole thing when Windows 7 came on line. Now the windows movie making software is a joke and doesn't even come preloaded. You can only get it through Windows Live...SO I now use a commercial software instead. Nothing good ever lasts.

[Israe5l]

I used to think philosophy was about "primacy". What is the single true understanding? Perhaps that is chasing monism. Hopeing to write reality as One. But now I feel comfortable with dualism to some extent. A balanced dualism. The logical dualism and the empirical dualism.

[2bsirius]

@Israe5l

Another great comment....I working on just this idea right now.

[Israe5l]

I am thinking of adapting to a relativism that endoreses countable infinity and the two trancedental numbers. Meaning irrational numbers are not true existence. There is a battle between rational and irrational numbers. This conclusion I have reached thinking of Kant's example of synthetic apriori. And Kant could go no furthure because there is no furthure. We only have countable numbers. (Kronecker) It has major relavance. Zeno's paradox. But more drastically the thoughts about chaos.

[2bsirius]

@Israe5l

Interesting idea. It's 8:19 in the morning here and I'm just on my second cuppa. I'll come back and think more about this when I'm fully awake.

[manwaring]

Is it wrong I want to start a religion dedicated to the Duckrabbit?

[RowanFortuneWood]

Popper inspired videos are great, thanks for uploading 5*

[Israe5l]

Of course, we can't go back wards in time. If we did go backwards thats not backwards anymore, its forwards.

[2bsirius]

@realskpetic

It works in experimentally .falsifiable ways... Theoretically predictable is useless if it isn't falsifiable. There are those who will tell you that Christianity is theoretically predictable

[Israe5l]

@Israe5l correction. logical pluralism comes from the contemplation of Two. (not One).

[Israe5l]

@2bsirius The story doesn't end there. After dichotomy we have trichotomy (because, take Two, half one of Two, one gets Three.) But I don't see Four or Five much. What we get next is Pluralism. Now this is a different beast. You have logical pluralism (which comes from the contemplation of One) and empirical pluralism which comes just from observation.

Perhaps one needs to live in dualism for a while till one progress to Triad. Most people will just go from One to many (empirical pluralism).

[Israe5l]

I was not clear on Kant. It for a long time been puzzled why Kant had only one example for synthetic apriori. Namely, "counting". My solution: there is only one synthetic apriori, which is "counting". But as we know from Cantor that, we only have countable numbers and uncountable numbers (uncountable infinity). So, I should truncate the uncountable: the irrational numbers. Now, the real line is a fiction. But then we never saw a real line in our life anyways. Nothing is lost.