HUMAN NATURE AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE I

CHAPTER 11A

HUMAN NATURE AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE I

The account of science presented in Chapter 3 meets with an objection: my notion of a fundamental practicality of science goes against the grain of traditional philosophy of science. Philosophers have observed that scientific theories are seldom accepted or rejected on the basis of their practicality. They have also observed that scientists are more likely to be motivated by the search for truth or the satisfaction of their intellectual curiosity than by the good of mankind. This tradition is eloquently expressed in the words of another great French scientist and philosopher, Henri Poincare, who at the beginning of this century wrote that "the scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living." [10]

For Poincare the beauty that really counted was not that of "qualities and appearances" ‑‑ the beauty accessible to most human beings ‑‑ but rather that "profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp."[11] That sentiment is not surprising in one who dedicated his life to understanding nature. But not all humans are so dedicated, and some of them have interests that would not coincide in the slightest with those of a mathematical physicist like Poincare. Nevertheless I think that Poincare was right in saying that scientists seldom study nature because it is useful. But I would stress a consequence, perhaps unintended, of his argument: that because life is worth living, nature is worth knowing.

The reason is that there is a sense in which the satisfaction of scientific curiosity has something akin to adaptive value. To see this more clearly it is helpful to consider how the nature of science arises from the nature of man. And by the nature of man I have in mind that human beings are biological products of their universe, as much a part of that universe as trees and stars. Let me begin, then, by pointing out that curiosity has adaptive value in animals. Of course not all animals have curiosity, but those that do, say the Norway rat or the raven, can adapt to a great variety of environments or to a changing environment. Curiosity, most often in the spirit of play leads them to obtain knowledge of the environment in which they find themselves. Curiosity is thus the key to their flexibility ("specialists in non‑specialization," Konrad Lorenz called them), and their flexibility is the key to their adaptive success.[12] We must also remember that the structures that underlie intelligence are biological. As a result, Jean Piaget says that intelligence "...is the most highly developed form of mental adaptation, that is to say, the indispensable instrument for interaction between the subject and the universe when the scope of this interaction goes beyond immediate and momentary contacts to achieve far‑ reaching and stable relations."

In short, intelligence has adaptive value. But science is not only a product of intelligence: it is also a means by which intelligence conceives of the universe, as we have seen. In such a case, should not science be expected to have adaptive value as well? Many of the lines of argument developed in this chapter should testify in favor of this claim (e.g. the relation between theoretical achievement and realization of opportunity or of danger). It must be kept in mind, however, that not all our faculties were selected for their present uses. But there is no suggestion here that human brains were selected for atomic physics or to build space telescopes. The selective forces had long done their job before humans thought of atoms or rockets. Nonetheless this consideration does not prevent a faculty developed for something else to acquire adaptive value of its own. And in the case of science the connection is even closer than that, as I will discuss next time.

ACADEMICS

ACADEMICS

First let me wish you all a happy new year. To meet some requests, I have enclosed below a list of my own formal academic publications on the philosophy of space exploration. If you know of other academic publications in this new filed, please let me know. I will collect any such for a while and publish the list in a future posting.

GONZALO MUNEVAR’S ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPACE EXPLORATION

"Report of an Interdisciplinary Course on Space Exploration," with John C. Kasher, in Social Sciences and Space Exploration, NASA Ep-192, 1984.

"Rhetorical Grounds for Determining what is Fundamental Science: The Case of Space Exploration," in Argument and Social Practice, J.R. Cox, M.O. Sillars, and G.W. Walker, eds., Speech Communication Association, 1985, pp. 420-434.

"Philosophy, Space Science and the Justification of Space Exploration," Essays on Creativity and Science, Diana M. DeLuca, ed. HCTE, Hawaii, 1986, pp. 89-96.

"Pecking Orders and the Rhetoric of Science," Explorations in Knowledge, Vol. III, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 43-48.

"Space Colonies and the Philosophy of Space Exploration," Space Colonization: Technology and the Liberal Arts, C.H. Holbrow, A.M. Russell & G.F. Sutton, eds., American Institute of Physics, Conference Proceedings 148, 1986, pp. 2-12.

"Filosofía y la Evaluación de la Tecnología Espacial," Arbor, May 1988, No. 509, Tomo CXXX, pp. 59-72.

"Human and Extraterrestrial Science," Explorations in Knowledge, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1989, pp. 1-9.

"Why Should Philosophy Influence Science Policy: The Case of Space Exploration," Explorations in Knowledge, vol. 13, No. 1, 1996, pp. 9-17.

“Philosophy and the Exploration of the Solar System,” Philosophic Exchange, No. 28: 1997-1998, pp. 56-61.

“A Philosopher Looks at Space Exploration,” as Chapter 13, Munevar G., Evolution and the Naked Truth, Ashgate, 1998, pp 169-179.

“SETI, Self-Reproducing Machines and Impossibility Proofs,” as Chapter 15, Munevar G., Evolution and the Naked Truth, Ashgatge, 1998, pp. 189-195.

“Venus y el Fin del Mundo,” Eidos, Vol. 4, March 2006, pp. 10-25.

“Humankind in Outer Space,” The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, Vol. 4, No. 5, 2008, pp. 17-25.

“Einstein y el límite de la velocidad de la luz,” in Guerrero G. (ed.) Einstein: Científico y filósofo, Programa Editorial Universidad del Valle, 2011, pp. 291-308.

“Self-Reproducing Automata and the Impossibility of SETI.” Forthcoming in Geppert, A. (ed.) Imagining Outer Space, Palgrave Macmillan.

Why the Philosophy of Space Exploration?

From: THE DIMMING OF STARLIGHT

The Philosophy of Space Exploration

By Gonzalo Munévar

CHAPTER I, Section A

WHY PHILOSOPHY?

One night almost 400 years ago Galileo turned his telescope to the sky, and the sky grew immense and crowded. Since then we have explored the heavens with telescope and mind, in the spirit of wonder and adventure. In our own time, through space exploration, we can touch where Galileo could only see, and we can reach where he could only dream. Our spaceships are beginning to realize a perennial longing made explicit by the great astronomer Johannes Kepler when he wrote to Galileo

There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight... Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travelers, maps of the celestial bodies — I shall do it for the Moon, you, Galileo, for Jupiter.[i]

Sky-travelers are, at long last, sailing along the routes marked on the maps of Kepler and Galileo. And as Kepler would have imagined, they find adventure, beauty and excitement in the enterprise. They also promise us knowledge and bright new hope if mankind agrees to expand first into the solar system and eventually into the galaxy. But how firm is this promise? And what sacrifices should we make so that it can be kept? Those are the main questions of this book. I want to examine why human beings explore space and to determine whether we ought to.

This examination is by no means easy, for space exploration elicits many polemical responses. On the one hand we have the enthusiasm of people like Wernher von Braun, the famous rocket expert, who claimed that, "[T]he first moon landing was equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling on the land."[ii] On the other hand we have social and ideological critics. The social critics argue that we are besieged by illness, poverty, and hopelessness. We thus have an obligation to invest our money, talents, and resources to solve these human problems, but the pursuit of space exploration competes for the means needed to fulfill our obligation. The ideological critics view space exploration as a logical extension of science, and science (at least “big science”) as a basically unwise activity, for science leads us to interfere with nature instead of trying to live in harmony with it. According to them, this now massive interference has brought the world to the brink of environmental catastrophe. Only a change of ideology, or perhaps of moral outlook, can give us hope. The "promise" of space is then nothing but a siren song that diverts our attention at a crucial moment in our history.

In response to these and other critics, space enthusiasts list the many benefits we derive from the space program: weather satellites save lives and crops; communication satellites bring about economic expansion; and land satellites discover resources and help us monitor the environment. Moreover, space technology spins off valuable products into our lives, such as cell phones, reflective insulation, and voice-controlled wheelchairs.

Why then is space exploration adrift? And why does it no longer excite the public passion as it did during its Golden Age in the 1960s, when we went to the Moon and the sky was no longer the limit? Should not the response by the space enthusiasts light star fires in the eyes of their fellow citizens? Why do the enthusiasts’ arguments fail to align social policy with their values and dreams? Econometric studies have not done the job. Comparisons of (presumed) costs and benefits have not done the job. Why do the bulk of humankind remain blind to such wonderful treasures at the end of cosmic rainbows?

Part of the reason has to do with the bad choices made since NASA became one more sluggish bureaucracy, particularly since its fateful decision to build the Space Shuttle, as I argue in Chapter 7. But the main reason is that space enthusiasts have not offered enough of a compelling argument. As we will see in Chapter 2, the social critics may simply accept space exploration but only to a point, as in fact most people do. They will agree to the likes of communication satellites, from which we clearly derive benefits. Now, daring space missions such as the probes of Jupiter and Titan give us knowledge, and, yes, that knowledge is exciting, but is it better than improving the lives of people? We have the same objection again, even if the scope is somewhat reduced. As for the ideological critics, they will stick to their guns, continuing to argue that the problems that our adventures in space might help alleviate would not arise if we learned to treat our environment and each other differently.

Space enthusiasts like to appeal to the unintended benefits of previous scientific exploration. Who could have imagined so many serendipitous discoveries when the first human-made satellite, Sputnik I, went into orbit in 1957? But can we really trust the promise that our most esoteric and daring adventures will deliver new and presently unimagined bounty? As we will also see in Chapter 2, the historical anecdotes generally offered to support the notion of the serendipity of science are not enough.

Can we offer enough? Yes – enough indeed to justify the exploration of space, as I argue in Chapter 3. We may begin by noticing that each side of the controversy justifies its position by appeal to the things it values, and that each stresses different values. The issue of justification thus has the air of a philosophical problem. And so it is, though not because it is a hopeless muddle, but because philosophical tools can be deployed to resolve it. Of these tools, the first is the philosopher's search for the assumptions that underlie the problem. Eventually this search will lead us to the realization that they are assumptions about the nature of science.

For example, the social critics find the value of scientific knowledge – as obtained through space science – not large enough to justify the money that it presumably takes away from attending to other human needs. But to estimate the value of scientific knowledge in any fruitful way one should have some idea of what science is like and of what it has to offer.

The ideological critics, for their part, hold that science is unwise. But what insights about science have led them to such a conclusion? And since reflecting on the nature of science is the province of the philosophy of science – whether done by philosophers, scientists, or lay people – the resolution of this important controversy in scientific and social policy is also a job for the philosophy of science.

My own reflections lead me to conclude that we ought to explore space. One crucial reason, as I argue in Chapter 3, is that the exploration of space will transform our views of the Earth and the universe to the significant benefit of our species. As we explore space we challenge our science, and as we challenge our science we change it in ways so profound that we come to face a different panorama of problems and opportunities in our dealings with the world. Indeed, it is as if a new world opens up to us; and when we try to adapt to the new “lay of the land,” ideas and inventions occur to us that would have been unimaginable under the old perspective.

We will see, in other words, that serendipity is a natural, practically inevitable consequence of scientific exploration. My argument will thus depend on the very nature of scientific exploration and on the way that nature is illustrated in space science and other aspects of our space adventures.

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[i] Johannes Kepler, Conversations with the Star Messenger, 1610. Partially quoted in A. Koestler, The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler, University Press of America, 1960, p. 195.

[ii] Quoted in W. S. Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution, John Wiley & Sons, 1976, p. 1.

Next Posting: brief summary of the arguments for space science: comparative planetology, space physics and astronomy, astrobiology, biological experiments in space