I find that I act according to elements of the enlightenment period’s scientific method. This is not because I am driven by or immersed in metaphysical or theological thought. I have, since first considering science in relation to God, held that God and Science are a match, or rather that Nature reflects God. It is the fact that God and Technology diverge that clouds the picture. But I have to know something for myself. If I hear a word, concept, or idea, I have to research the thing, even if it does not have thingness. I need to gain at least a basic understanding. Then I will continue to study if I am interested or feel that it might be rich in analogous elements. Otherwise I let it go. I see this in people whose intellect I admire, such as Nash, Newton, Kant, Plato, Jung, Erikson, Milton, Galileo, Einstein, and many others. Many of these thinkers had psychiatric conditions, which I consider touch points. But the main affinity I feel is the need with these people, not to just know, but to be sure, or to experience, to integrate their actions and their beliefs.
- We all carry some blindly believed knowledgebe cause we cannot realistically test every statement uttered by others. When I tell you that the proton has an antimatter counterpart (the anti proton), you would need $1billion worth of laboratory apparatus to verify my statement. So it’s easier to just believe me and trust that, at least most of the time, and at least with regard to the astrophysical world, I know what I am talking about. I don’t mind if you remain skeptical. In fact, I encourage it. Feel free to visit your nearest particle accelerator to see antimatter for yourself. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole
- No one was more obsessed with originality, more disdainful of authority, or more jealous of his independence. As a young man he was surrounded by the high priests of twentieth-century science; Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener — but he joined no school, became no one’s disciple, got along: largely without guides or followers. In almost everything he did — from game theory to geometry — he thumbed his nose at the received wisdom, current fashions, established methods. He almost always worked alone, in his head, usually walking, often whistling Bach. Nash acquired his knowledge of mathematics not mainly from studying what Other mathematicians had discovered, but by rediscovering their truths for himself. Eager to astound, he was always on the lookout for the really big problems. When he focused on some new puzzle, he saw dimensions that people who really knew the subject (he never did) initially dismissed as naive or wrong-headed. Even as a student, his indifference to others’ skepticism, doubt, and ridicule was awesome. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind
Four essential elements of a scientific method are iterations, recursions, interleavings, or orderings of the following:
- Characterizations (observations, definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry)
- Hypotheses (theoretical, hypothetical explanations of observations and measurements of the subject)
- Predictions (reasoning including logical deduction from the hypothesis or theory)
- Experiments (tests of all of the above)
Wikipedia
While often statistics and math are discussed in connection to the hard sciences, it is the soft sciences from which I draw my fascination. My mind attempts to consider and process paths, associations, and analogies between varying fields in order to find significance and correlation for understanding (sciences) and more efficient application (technology).
- Correlation – I am not concerned as much with prediction within a field where understanding has been formulated, as with with cause and effect. In the end, cause and effect point to a relationship. I hold that these relationships follow rules and further believe that observation has shown these rules to be ordered, following a pattern. The likelihood is that those relationships point to similar rules in other fields of study. When any behavioral factor has been identified, then a causal relation needs to be account for. What I am really after is the relationships. Statistics applied to soft scientists tend to be considered less scientific than statistics when applied to chemistry or physics. My impression is that the hard sciences do not have to take into account as many factors as soft sciences. Soft sciences not only need to take account of a vast number of physical factors, but also psychological and sociological factors. In the end if there is a relationship, then knowledge of the relationship includes the data.
- Significance – I am constantly seeing political polls and social concern polls which refer to the results as significant or highly significant when they are only a bit past a 50/50 percent chance. 95% is the significant number I look for.
Why do I say this? Because I constantly scan for correlation and significance as my mind lingers over observations. I like to think that, like Simone Weil, I am often intrigued by ideas, not to form them only but to see want experience can contribute. I feel the desire to experience a life style, experience a type of work, or participation in social groups. For me, Weil seems to have blurred the line between participation and self destruction. Following participation, life, and experiment, she wasted away early in her 40s. In the following section from chapter 2 of Simone Weil by Francine Du Plessix Gray, I find several observations which point me to this concept of experiment or testing.
I am also considering the lens of “pilgrimage, ” the idea of moving from doubt to faith, from lack of understanding to clarity, to relate to this living out experiment. During the early part of the enlightenment where doubt was close to the start of any thought. The marriage of pilgrimage, doubt, and belief, are seen in Leslie C. Allan of Fuller Seminary article on Psalm 73: Pilgrimage from Doubt to Faith.
For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, ‘Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains—with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me,—solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case. Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick [page 182] 170 Of mischief happened to me, Gods knows when— In a bad dream, perhaps. Here ended, then, Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts—you’re inside the den.
Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
Here is what I see in Simone’s Weil’s method:
- She wanted to participate in social traits of classes other than hers
- She would participate even if an activity she was studying was not pleasant
- She persisted through the problems she faced for the sake of the knowledge to be gained
- She did not fall in the stereotypical participation in these exercises, as they were experiences or experiments
- She took advantage of her situation to gather other knowlege as it passed, i.e. constellations
- She focuses on understanding ideas rather than nourishing her physical nature
- Her relationships, even summer passing ones, led to deeper than average relationships
- Her concern was the needs of people and how they could be nourished enough to remain in a condition in which they can flourish
Francine Du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil, chapter 2 – stint as a fisherman on the Normandy coast
… she vacationed with her parents in 1931 at the end of her last year at Normale. Dr and Madam Weil, sensing her emotional need for this kind of exertion went to Normandy ahead of her to help her join a fishing group. Most of the seamen were reluctant to take on an inexperienced woman. But one fisherman, Marcel Lecarpentier, owner of a four man boat, acceded to Dr Weil’s request. ” I decided to please Dr. Weil when I saw his daughter running along the shore like a mad woman,” he recalls, “She was going into the sea in her wide skirt, she was going soaking wet without slicker. I had already left shore but I turned around and went back and picked her up. I borrowed a set of oil skins to wrap her in.” She had a little book and a pencil with her. She spent a good part or the night drawing the constellations and writing. Lecarpentier eventually welcomed Simone into his house and became a friend and left a long recollection of her. “She wasn’t pretty and she would not take care of herself. She was a real ragamuffin. Her parents suffered from this and someone else in my village kept telling me, don”t have her into your house, she is a communist and will bring you trouble. I did not mind at all. She had a right to my table. Moreover she was not a communist, she was to teach my child catachysm.” When the sea was to rough to go out, Simone helped Lecarpentier continue his own education in arithmetic and French literature, and went on tutoring him long after she went back to Paris. “For months to come, I would sent her my notebooks and she would correct them and sent them back to me,” Lecarpentier recalled. “And she continues sending me books, Gold Seekers of Alaska, for example. She wanted to know our misery she wanted to free the worker, this was the goal of her life. I would say to her you are the daughter of rich people. She”d say, “That”s my misfortune I wish my parents had been poor.” “You would not know so much, you wouldn’t have studied so much,” I would tell her. “No, no, you and I would have gotten to the same point,” she”d answer.