Plurality

The Inevitable Pluralist Demise of Science

The Funeral of a Maths-based Approach!

Since the necessary establishment of a Pluralist Conception of Reality by the Ancient Greeks, what has appeared to be the ever-expanding Understanding of Reality, has, in fact, been only an exploration of a very different, though-related, "world" called Ideality - involving only Pure Forms alone as its sole content - indeed, The Lauded Realm of Mathematics. And, in taking such a blinkered-course, Mankind has embarked upon such a flawed-and-contradictory path, as to both achieve sound technological gains, but, unavoidingly, along with them, a more-often-than-not totally unsound attempt at Understanding that Reality.

The problems reside in the confusion arising from the purely formal Reflections of Reality, delivered via Mathematics - occurring only-as-such in what we call Ideality, and seeing it as the supposed Determining Essence of Reality itself. For, while the real objective, concrete Reality outside includes everything that there is, along with its continuing necessary development: Ideality contains only Pure Forms alone - it is like a purely, formal mirror of Reality, reflecting only its current Forms, moment-by-moment, but absolutely none of its determining Causality.

Clearly, all the displayed patterns are delivered directly by observation and measurement, but none of the reasons for them are even implicitly resident in that data - only purely formal relations!

And, Form can never be a determining cause of anything: it us always only one of the consequences (effects) of such a cause.

For, Causality come from the properties of things, and the transforming processes they produce in given contexts. The student of Pure Forms alone can see patterns in viewed (reflected) space, and can even record sequences of them over time, but the seductive possibilities of the purely formal patterns extracted, and their valuable use in prediction, can, and indeed often do, take precedence over the much more difficult to extract causal relations.

And, significantly, such extracted formal patterns, having now been separated from their physical causes, can now only deliver a disembodied pattern, and hence always conform only to the Principle of Plurality - in which all relations are forever fixed, and, therefore, the only relations immediately evident are the quantitative ones of Mathematics, which can only relate the perfect versions of such forms to one another.

Indeed, it took Mankind thousands of years to even begin to do that!

For, it was necessary, usually, to initially study totally unchanging things - like the Heavens, and then, for literally everywhere else, to isolate situations, then significantly simplify and control them sufficiently, until some pure formalism was clearly evident - and to then extract and study that.

But, to even do that, required absolutely NO qualitative developments or changes to be allowed to occur, for any such extracted relation to be useable. Moreover, if Reality were Holistic (which it is), such extracted relations could never be counted upon outside of their artificially achieved, maintained and necessarily-stable contexts!

So, Mankind had to do two things to get-around the problem:-

1. They always replicated exactly the same conditions as had been achieved in extraction, as essential in any use!

2. They devised the Principle of Plurality to make such ideas "legitimate" theoretically!

So, though the farming of locations enabled great technological success: the pluralistic assumptions in Theory were bound to lead to contradiction, as Hegel had long ago demonstrated in classical Formal Logic.

NOTE: Surprisingly, Neil Turok, of the Perimeter Institute, placed Formal Logic ahead of Mathematics, when in fact it was the achievements of Mathematics that established the pluralistic basis for Formal Logic, and preceded it historically too!

Physicist & Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Neil Turok

Indeed, though we rightly laud the vital contributions of the Greeks, we rarely criticise the amalgam of contradictory stances that they thereafter bequeathed to Mankind. For, they certainly added to the prior Pragmatism of early Man, by bringing in both Idealism (from Mathematics) and Materialism (from observational Science). And, when, Plurality was also added to these, the overall stance was unavoidably piecemeal - consisting of many contradictory parts, with their laws only useable in particular contexts!

So, the sequence of Crises in Physics, culminating in the abandonment of Physical Explanation - with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, was the direct and unavoidable consequence of the major flaws in the underlying Philosophy of Physics, and the backwards step to purely pragmatic, predictive objectives, on the one hand, and idealistic speculations on the other, which can, and indeed will, solve nothing!