The Real Philosophy of Science

By Jim Schofield

A complete rethinking of the Philosophy of Science is now vital. As climate change accelerates and capitalism slowly dies around us, it is no longer hyperbolic to state that human civilization now hangs in the balance. For the positivist consensus, salvation must come from science and its greater capacity to understand these problems and proffer vital solutions. Unfortunately for us all, and unbeknownst to most, science is in dire straights too. As it stands, contemporary science is not equipped to deal with these profound qualitative changes, or even its own shortcomings and failings. Physics, for example, has been undergoing a secret existential crisis for an entire century.
For the last ten years, physicist and philosopher Jim Schofield, has been publishing new theories and damning critiques of the scientific consensus in SHAPE Journal. His polemical writing largely rejects the epistemology of science as it is usually conceived, and instead poses a dialectical view of scientific history, its impasses and mistakes, and our flawed methods and assumptions.

The Real Philosophy of Science is Jim Schofield’s first full-length book on the subject, but it is long overdue. Many hundreds of papers have been published by the author. Included in this vast body of work is a final refutation of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, alternative explanations for all of the anomalies of the Double Slit experiments, an extension of Charles Darwin’s theories to look at how they might apply to the evolution of reality in general, and the Theory of Emergences, which shows how Marx’s ideas apply beyond the social realm – to the revolutions which happen in nature. For Jim Schofield, it is only through real Marxist intervention in science, and scientific rethinking of Marx, that we can transcend the hidden impasses that now plague human thinking, and set the course of civilisation back on track.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Schofield
• Release date: Oct 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463893890

Jim Schofield

Jim Schofield is a retired Professor, Theoretical Physicist and devoted polymath with very diverse interests, from Computer Science and Sculpture, to Dance and Mathematics. He has been writing critically on the Philosophy of Science for many decades, and began publishing his extensive research in this area online, after establishing SHAPE Journal with Dr. Peter Mothersole and his son Mick Schofield, in 2009. Before taking early retirement in the 1990s due to ill health, Schofield was Director of Information Technology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Prior to that post he worked in computer-aided research in many different fields including Mathematics, Biology, Engineering and Dance Education. For many years Jim Schofield was active in left-wing politics, a former member of the Labour Party and Young Socialists, and later the Workers Revolutionary Party. While critical of the movement he continues to be a committed Marxist, and it is from this philosophical standpoint, and his many decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, that his profound criticism of contemporary science stems.

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The Real Philosophy of Science

Copyright 2018 Jim Schofield

Published by Jim Schofield at Smashwords

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Editing and Art Direction

Mick Schofield

Featuring paintings by

Ilya Chashnik

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part 1: Finding Truth

1.1 The Initial Gains

1.2 The Holist Mix

1.3 Seeking a Marxian Method for Science

1.4 Building a New Physics

1.5 Dismantling Quantum Physics

1.6 The Physics of the Universal Substrate

Part 2: Approaching Holist Physics

2.1 The Necessary Premise

2.2 Holistic Iterations

2.3 Precursors of Holist Science: Darwin and Miller

2.4 Constructivist Experiments

Part 3: Finishing Marxism

3.1 The Belated Turn

3.2 The Contribution of Karl Marx

3.3 The Contributions of Jim Schofield I: The Theory of Emergences

3.4 The Contributions of Jim Schofield II: The Double Slit Experiments

3.5 The Contributions of Jim Schofield III: Mathematics, Epistemology, Abstraction

3.6 The Contributions of Jim Schofield IV: The Universal Substrate

3.7 The Contributions of Jim Schofield IV: The Demise of Copenhagen

3.8 Conclusions

Appendix

1 Quantization without Copenhagen

2 The Myth of Quantum Emergence: What is Information Theory?

3 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and an Undetectable Substrate

About the Author

The SHAPE Journal

Connect with Jim Schofield

Prologue

As climate change accelerates and capitalism slowly dies around us, it is no longer hyperbolic to state that human civilization now hangs in the balance. For the positivist consensus, salvation must come from science and its greater capacity to understand these problems and proffer vital solutions. Unfortunately for us all, and unbeknownst to most, science is in dire straights too. As it stands, contemporary science is not equipped to deal with these profound qualitative changes, or even its own shortcomings and failings. Physics, for example, has been undergoing a secret existential crisis for an entire century.

For the last ten years, physicist and philosopher Jim Schofield, has been publishing new theories and damning critiques of the scientific consensus in SHAPE Journal. His polemical writing largely rejects the epistemology of science as it is usually conceived, and instead poses a dialectical view of scientific history, its impasses and mistakes, and our flawed methods and assumptions.

The Real Philosophy of Science is Jim Schofield’s first full-length book on the subject, but it is long overdue. Many hundreds of papers have been published by this author, and all are available, open access, via www.e-journal.org.uk. Included in this vast body of work is a final refutation of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, alternative explanations for all of the anomalies of the Double Slit experiments, an extension of Charles Darwin’s theories to look at how they might apply to the evolution of reality in general, and the Theory of Emergences, which shows how Marx’s ideas apply beyond the social realm – to the revolutions which happen in nature.

For Jim Schofield, it is only through real Marxist intervention in science, and scientific rethinking of Marx, that we can transcend the hidden impasses that now plague human thinking, and set the course of civilization back on track.

Mick Schofield

Editor

Part 1: Finding Truth

The infinite process and its many twists and turns

1.1 The Initial Gains

Humankind was not congenitally-endowed with the ideal mental faculties for understanding the World. Only a few million years ago you could not significantly distinguish our ancestors from other animals. And yet, life has been present upon this planet for over three billion years. And, from what we have latterly been able to reveal about Evolution, absolutely none of its mechanisms were for making-sense of that World. That particular facility has been a very late human achievement, and chiefly a social one.

Most importantly of all, what achievements we have made in Understanding should never be considered to be an ever-upwards climb along an incremental ladder of relevant truths, for as many confusing, damaging and even misleading conclusions have been arrived at, over the millennia, as useful or revealing ones.

Many a wrong turning has taken literally thousands of years to be realized and transcended. Nothing in our whole history has been discovered that could allow direct-and-unambiguous-access to Absolute Truth - for what could possibly ever totally confirm such discoveries? Indeed, the best that Humankind could ever achieve was to add to their slowly-built store of Objective Content – which is not the same as Absolute Truth, but involves only aspects or parts of the Truth, which taken-alone will always, in the end, lead to mistaken conclusions. And, long periods can elapse, before the inherent contradictions within our current conceptions, force an inevitable crisis, and possibly allow a new and significant contribution to that Objective Content.

Now, there is a sizeable section of Humankind, who totally reject this view energetically. For, they dedicatedly subscribe to the very earliest intellectual gain made by people, and crucially can exploit it to their advantage with vigor, strength and occasional success!

This gain is encapsulated in the main tenet of pragmatism, namely –

If it works, it is right!.

And, we should never underestimate the power of that idea.

Indeed, with literally no other intellectual means, Man still managed to spread to all accessible parts of the then-known world equipped only with that simple tenet. Effective as it has been, it delivers precisely no actual understanding: it is basically knowledge of what can be effectively used to our advantage. It is never about Why?: it is only about How?

But, of course, real developments in everything concrete were always occurring, and the interactions of physical changes, particularly for us, in Man's remarkable structure - for example, in his bipedal gait and unusual hands, originally selected-for during a life in the trees for locomotion, but now available for other remarkable manipulations and processes. The incredible works of V. Gordon Childe, in particular, Man Makes Himself and What Happened in History, lay out the interactions that, in everyday living, elicited changes in the human brain connected with the capabilities of the hand, but also providing neural resources that could be, and ultimately were, employed elsewhere by inherited features in Evolution.

Now, the whole area of the development of Understanding is of course crucial, and has always been circumvented by Pragmatism and Technology, to such an extent, that the consensus methods now current everywhere, are finally proving totally inadequate. The proof of that pudding is most clearly revealed in Science.

For over 2,500 years, the most important principle has been that of Plurality, for our complex and changing World appeared only at all comprehensible if it were held still, or to be more accurate, if situations were both sufficiently-simplified and firmly-controlled, for an individual relation to be both easily observable and even extractable.

But, the question posed, by such a methodology, was to do with whether the extracted relation delivered, had in any way been changed by the methods used to get-it-out! Now, the answer to this question is immediately revealed, by the fact that it could only be successfully used to deliver some required end, if-and-only-if the conditions-for-use were identical to those required for extraction. And while successful uses could be achieved by such means, any attempt to actually understand what was going on, was not.

So, the Principle of Plurality was envisaged, in which all Natural Laws were totally independent of one another: and they were deemed to be eternal and primary, and hence totally unaffected by context. This principle is most certainly false. In establishing it at the heart of Science, the actual realm of that discipline was unavoidably restricted to areas of fundamental Stability - the only places where Plurality was true within Reality.

This unspoken principle also gave undue emphasis to Mathematics, where, because of its establishment based solely upon Perfect Forms, it also perfectly conformed to Plurality! Indeed, the only way any sort of progress could be made, was by subscribing to several contradictory stances at once - held-together, once again, by pragmatism:

If it works, it is right!

And this supposedly constituted what was called Science, but was in fact an amalgam, which included Materialism, Idealism, Mathematics and Formal Logic, all also conforming to an unacknowledged Plurality, and integrated by hidden switches between them, always justified by the above pragmatist tenet. This Positivist fusion of cul-de-sacs was surprisingly pervasive and stable, and terminating it was not going to be easy.

In spite of Zeno of Elea's very early (and very correct) criticism of Plurality in his Paradoxes, absolutely no philosophical gains were made on this matter for a further 2,300 years, until Hegel finally took up Zeno's philosophical problem and extended it to a whole group of similar Dichotomous Pairs of contradictory concepts, where Formal Logic would always, and inevitably, arrive at an impasse. This is where two contradictory concepts appeared to be equally valid: and the rules of Formal Logic could not resolve the paradox.

Maybe you can guess what the solution was?

Each option was tried, and the one that allowed Reasoning to continue was adopted!

Pragmatism strikes again.

If it works, it is right!

But, Hegel knew very well that such a frig was insufficient, and he decided to examine the founding definitions (or premises) of each option in a Dichotomous Pair. He was able to find the cause of the problem in the inadequate premises producing the two options. And, on correcting those premises, he turned the original impasse into a logical fork in the Reasoning. Now, this correction was not as easy as it at first appeared, because the necessary premises unavoidably involved the context, and Plurality had made all entities, statements and even Laws independent-of-context. Clearly, there were much more profound things amiss. Hegel realized that all things changed qualitatively, mostly due to changing context - so what Plurality did was to totally exclude the possibility of Qualitative Change for everything within its aegis!

It was, in fact, the crucial Principle of Stability, and it excluded all real Development.

All Qualitative Change and Development had now to be included in philosophy, otherwise the lauded Formal Logic would apply only to such Stabilities. Hegel went beyond Dichotomous Pairs, and saw then as merely special cases of a more general Interpenetration of Opposites, which he identified as being at the heart of all Qualitative Change. And, he determined to transform Formal Logic into a Science of Logic, which included Qualitative Changes wherever they occurred. But, his method of considering Opposites in all their inter-relationships did not produce his aimed-for Science of Logic, for Hegel was an idealist philosopher, limiting all this to discussions and arguments, for which he did indeed produce his Dialectics, which investigated the possible balances and switches between Opposites.

A revolution had been started, but had not been completed! For, two things remained to be comprehensively tackled. The first was to transfer Dialectics out of its limitation to Human Thinking, and into a truly Materialist Context, and therefore, both true-of, and applicable-to all the qualitative developments in the material World too. And, the second was to