Chapter Ten; Page 166

Scale

Here is a question pertinent to a modern sense of self-awareness. Does the notion of scale and size impose any limits on our knowledge? Perhaps many involved with modern science would answer, “No,” but for those of us seeking self-awareness the matter bears closer scrutiny.

Is there a “human scale” inherent in some stories and absent in others that can lend them credence or detract it?

Our best scientific models suggest that our senses have a real scale, and they are the primary conduits of all our information. Our eyes see only certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, the range we call “light,” and there are limits to the size resolution that even the best eyes can discriminate. Our ears hear “sound” likewise only within a certain useful range, a function of both wavelength and amplitude. Our skin feels “sensations” of some types very acutely, like heat and fleas, and is oblivious to other potential stimuli, like x-rays and gases. It is the same with our chemoreceptive senses, smell and taste. Water and oxygen are essentially undetectable by both as is a more dangerous gas, carbon monoxide (do not try this experiment). On the other hand we are quite sensitive to the smell of hydrogen sulfide, smoke, food, etc.

Are we then limited by these sensory ranges in our formulation of credible knowledge? Within the MTK it is fair to judge that stories/models which can be directly and repeatedly affirmed by our unaided senses will naturally carry a higher level of credibility, but mankind has been inventing useful technology allowing amplification of the normal sensory range for centuries now. The reliability of the telescope, the microscope, the gas analyzer, the seismograph, medical x-rays and a thousand other sense expanding devices is not really in question from a pragmatic point of view. Philosophically we could question the credibility of the type of knowledge such devices can provide, but if their data can be cross-referenced with other observations to form a coherent and consistent model of physical reality, the information they furnish helps to form as reliable a rational story as we might construct. (The convergence of data is called consilience, a term perhaps invented by William Whewell, but certainly used by him in the 19th century.)

Where are the limits of trust in such sense-expanding tools? There are published measurements of fluctuations in the duration of Earth’s rotational cycle on the scale of less than 0.5 sec/yr. By whatever means of instrumentation, such data purports to measure a variation of less than one unit in 63 million for a phenomenon enormously larger than human scale. Does this begin to stretch the limits of our credulity? Although perhaps meaningful in certain scientific models, might we otherwise effectively ignore this variation in the Earth’s rotation without consequence? Can we be confident that this variation is indeed a genuine measure of a real natural phenomenon rather than a random fluctuation of one unit in 63 million on the part of the instrumentation or the operators’ ability to handle the equipment and read and record the values?

Decide for yourself. Modern scientists apparently feel comfortable dealing with very indirect and inferential data, but their confidence can depend on the context. Tolerances, resolution and discriminations of parts per billion are claimed and used. In many chemical tests this is justified because instruments can be readily calibrated from standardized situations. The rest of us might feel a little uncomfortable calling this “knowledge,” but by using a reference base of carefully engineered settings and instruments such information can produce stories with good operational utility, even if sensory affirmation is sometimes weak or absent.

Little scientific investigation in the year 2008 is done using only the unaided senses, and much is done using instrumentation which sometimes does not allow cross-referencing by our unaided senses. How is such information to be judged? A complete discussion of data from advanced instrumentation would exceed our scope here. Reader is referred to a paper by William Bechtel (2000) in the review work, Biology and Epistemology, to see one treatment of this problem, for at least two modern imaging technologies. He uses the standard of consilience, i.e., the convergence of information from various channels of investigation, to support models suggested by images produced with advanced equipment like the electron microscope and PET scan. Without consilience and cross-referencing, he indicates that the problems of instrument artifact and even the process of visual perception and interpretation might well create illusion.

We can approach the question of indirect or inferential information as a matter of scale, by looking at the extremes…from the most credible to the least. Since the slant of our search favors rational skepticism, a fairly high level of credibility will be required for a story to be incorporated into the modern sense of self-awareness we hope to develop. Hypotheses remain candidates to be knowledge until refuted, and even speculative hypotheses can serve the purpose of directing attention and guiding research.

As an illustration of credible indirect knowledge, consider a landmark observation from the 1970’s which led to a story/model that must justly be incorporated into our modern self-awareness…the view of Earth from the surface of the Moon. When the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, they captured the view of Earth from that aspect in some very important photos. (Some dispute that Moon landings occurred, but this is irrelevant to our point here. We are focused on the image of Earth, derived by whatever means). The image captured by the instrument could be directly affirmed by the unaided senses of observers who were there, or perhaps not. The rest of us were not there, but from these photos, which, in any case, speak for themselves with stunning resolution, and the astronauts’ testimony, we have no difficulty accepting this visualization of Earth from that vantage point, as a visualization supported by an abundance of other visual satellite data since then. While this level of sensory affirmation of an indirect observation might not represent a typical case, it is one example of an indirect observation that achieved a high level of consilience and therefore credibility. One aspect of consilience, not in dispute, is that the detailed outlines of Earth’s continents visible in the space photos coincide precisely with the shape of these land masses given them by cartographers in maps of the Earth made years earlier. It is a testimonial to man’s engineering skill that these earlier maps were made using measurements gathered only from Earth’s surface or close-in aerial images.

On the other extreme, there is an abundance of information, stories at the very edge of credibility, for which we might consider it important to get a hold on an accurate, balanced perspective of our size and scale. Just how big and just how important are we in the scheme of things?

To get this assessment of our scale, it will be necessary to rely on science’s current models and data, and the mathematics and language used to describe them, under the assumption that these represent mankind’s best efforts at this type of natural knowledge in the year 2008. We are not backtracking in our skepticism by doing this. The mathematics are not in nature, but rather, like any other language, they describe nature with our symbols. As we use these models and calculations we are always aware that they are all amendable and even refutable. But still, we need a frame of reference and up to date self-awareness can only rely on the best efforts at knowledge. We might have every reason to be skeptical of the statements and calculations involving the far reaches of outer space, but these models and numbers are all we have, the best that science has done. Even if they are inaccurate, they can give us a sense of proportion, or even a rough estimate (see e.g. Kaufmann, 1985). So…how big are we?