THE METHODOLOGY: HOW TO BUILD A MAP OF THE ENTIRE EXISTENCE?

INTRODUCTION

How do we traverse the almost infinite amounts of data, information and knowledge that is getting thrown at us every moment? After having traversed the various dimensions of knowledge, can we claim to have access to any knowledge at all?

This project can be seen as a series or a set of objectives (stupid, tough or impossible – as you may please) – let us call these “knowledge destinations” we wish to discover or arrive at.

No travel is possible without a map – even if we do not have a map, we shall make one as we move along the journey of knowledge. The goal of this project is to traverse different domains of knowledge and craft a map along the way.

RULES

There are no rules here – still we shall list few indicators and parameters being to used to build the map:

We assume nothing
We challenge and question everything
We do use logical constructs like arguments, statements, premise and conclusions (e.g., see here Introduction to Logic: Some Basic Concepts)
[Optional, but strongly recommended!] Have Fun!

CHALLENGE AND QUESTION EVERYTHING

List of questions or thought constructs to help us challenge the status quo.

A great question to begin with could be:

What have we failed to consider, so far?

For example, the above question was posed by William Schopf regarding origins of life as reported by Michael Shermer (2005, Scientific American). An excerpt:

Schopf began with the known: “We know the overall sequence of life’s origin, from CHONSP [carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus], to monomers, to polymers, to cells; we know that the origin of life was early, microbial and unicellular; and we know that an RNA world preceded today’s DNA-protein world. We do not know the precise environments of the early earth in which these events occurred; we do not know the exact chemistry of some of the important chemical reactions that led to life; and we do not have any knowledge of life in a pre-RNA world.” As for what we have failed to consider, Schopf noted a problem with what he called “the pull of the present”–it is extremely difficult to model the early earth’s atmosphere and the biochemistry of early life because we are so accustomed to conditions today.

A “love” for contrarian thinking has its own pitfalls. Chris Miller can help us with this – Laura Gardner talks about his work in her post “An Epistemology of Scientific Crackpottery”.

Miller’s epistemology proposes four scientific-outlier phenotypes: con men (and they do seem to be all men), like Hwang; mountebanks, more akin to snake-oil salesmen than working scientists; and two types of scientific heretics — heroes and crackpots.

Heretic-heroes interest Miller the most. Two examples are Oswald Avery, who discovered that genetic material comes from DNA, and Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock, who discovered genetic transposition. “Heretics get burned at the stake,” Miller says. “But they turn out to be right.” Heretic-crackpots, on the other hand, stay religiously attached to their ideas, even in the face of mounting contrary evidence.

Miller also talks about Heretic-heroes in the same article:

Heretic-heroes are deeply creative, substantive scientists whose contrarian ideas are initially dismissed, rejected and ridiculed by their colleagues. In a few cases, their ideas are utterly ignored.

Heroes are stubborn. They are passionate. They can be egotistical and ambitious. But they are also open-minded, willing to digest the evidence that nature provides. They might be laughed off the stage when they propose their ideas, but these ideas are eventually incorporated into the mainstream, because they expand the edge of discovery.

Barbara McClintock, a plant geneticist who worked on chromosomal crossing over. In 1950, she published her radical findings on transposition, or jumping genes. She met with so much hostility she stopped publishing on transposition in 1953 — but kept working on it.

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s, after her retirement, that her work earned recognition. Eventually, she won the usual string of awards leading to the Nobel. Her first recognition by the scientific community was Brandeis’ Rosenstiel Award in 1977, followed in 1981 by the first MacArthur Foundation Grant ever given.

EPISTEMOLOGY

Going forward, we review how humans have attempted to arrive at knowledge so far. Epistemology is a formal study on the “nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

Formal epistemology explores knowledge and reasoning using “formal” tools, tools from math and logic. For example, a formal epistemologist might use probability theory to explain how scientific reasoning works. Or she might use modal logic to defend a particular theory of knowledge.

As we traverse different knowledge domains, we keep reviewing the formal epistemological tools and use as appropriate.

Miller has a simpler definition in the above quoted article:

“An epistemology is a system of knowing how we know what we think we know.”