The Scientific Method: How philosophers nursed natural philosophy into a method that safeguards our world.

Before science was SCIENCE, it was Natural Philosophy. Hear a story of Alhazen, the world’s first scientist, and dig into the real value of the scientific method. 

What comes up in this episode:

~  Alhazen ~

~  Francis Bacon ~

~  How the scientific method safeguards against bias ~

~  Parallels in the development of the scientific method and academic philosophy ~

Referenced or mentioned:

~  Euclid ~

~  Ptolemy ~

~  Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica   ~

~  Buster Harper ~

~  Breakfast burritos ~

A thought to carry with you: 
  “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynman

Credits / Links:

~  The So, You’re A Philosopher homepage: ponderpus.com  ~

~  Text or leave a voicemail for Chris : 469.626.7355 ~

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So you're a philosopher? Hmm. Let's start with a story. A tale about a man who feigned madness to escape execution and turned ten years of house arrest into a season of learning that changed the world. The boy was perhaps ten years old. He'd only been a servant in the vizier's household for half a day, yet he'd already heard of the mad builder, the forced guest who occupied the eastern rooms. He struggled to remember what he was supposed to say as he approached the Sheikh's door. Tales of odd behaviors and supernatural gifts swirled around his mind. A raised voice could be heard, forceful and quick. He raised a shaky hand to knock, trying not to upset the tray of refreshments he carried. The voice grew louder inside, then the door was flung open. A man with a grey flecked beard and piercing eyes stuck his head out and scanned the hallway, his speech washing over the boy. We have much that we understand about optics, he said, as he pulled the servant inside and shut the door. But also much that is accepted yet seems unlikely. Much is offered as proof that has been untested. He gently pushed on the servant's shoulder and gestured to the floor. The boy, bewildered, sat, cradling the tray in his lap. The entire time the sheikh's rhetoric continued without pause. We have light and vision, examined through mathematics. We have the body, examined through observation and experience. The greatest of philosophers have passed down teachings about the nature of the sun and the prime materials and the substance of the cosmos. What I am attempting to do is consider all that has come before and put it to the test. For my own sake, to answer the questions that rise up. When I read Hunan ibn Ishaq write about the eye, or Ptolemy's thoughts on light, the room was large but crowded. Tables with equipment and books dominated the space, and the walls were covered with papers showing drawings, words, numbers. Small mirrors on stands were distributed about, and on a shelf sat an inflated animal bladder that was painted with a crude drawing of an eye. Afternoon sunlight streamed in from a window, bracketed with heavy curtains. The man stepped to the table and rooted through its contents. Euclid said that the eye emits beams, beams that travel straight out at angles that form a cone. He was right about the math, but if beams emit from the eye, how can we not see in darkness? Look here. He held up for the boy's inspection a diagram, an eye, a cone of lines, a series of cat images, each smaller than the last. Euclid explained how the size of objects can appear to change depending on distance and the angle viewed. And vision does follow straight lines, you see, and in the shape of a cone that originates from the eye, but he reasoned that the eye must emit rays of some kind that follow that path. Should we just accept this inference? He dropped the paper and pointed to a mirror. Now, Hero of Alexandria proved that light follows the shortest path. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection, and I've proven this to be true following his example, but that still doesn't address emission. Here he raised the back of his hands to just below his eyes and waggled fingers towards the boy. Versus intro mission. Now he flipped his hands around and the fingers waggled towards his eyes. The boy, though missing many of the words the sheikh used, was entranced as the man now picked up a book and flipped the pages. The geometers always get the math right in the end, but many questions remain. He flipped the book around and pointed at another diagram, a mechanical dissection of an eyeball. So, we looked to the physicians. Galen, primarily. He studied the eye and the mind, and he spoke how these organs allowed for vision to work, but he too spoke of emission. Others, like Hunyan ibn Ishach, were able to support Galen's anatomical claims, but they also preserved his reliance on unobservable pneuma. He looked over his shoulder to explain the Greek word. That's breath, or animated spirit. Many Greek philosophers used pneuma to explain otherwise unquantifiable aspects of nature. And so, these old masters were able to make known the instrument of optics, but not the cause. He dropped the book onto the table and began to pace, his hands now on his hips. A thousand years have passed and still these mysteries persist. Why? Could it be reliance on authority? Plato said that vision occurs when something fire-like issues from the eye and joins with external light. This was speculation. He was inferring from his own experience how sight feels active to him. But if the eye emits fire, why do we wince when we look into the sun? And again, why are we rendered sightless in the dark? Aristotle countered his teacher in this, as in many things, and supposed answers to follow those questions by stating that the eye is receptive in nature, that objects act on a transparent medium, such as air, and that the medium connects the object to the eye, which can then perceive it. But he indicated light as a key factor, stating that the medium must be activated by the light, hence our blindness in the dark. But he never tested these ideas. Right or wrong, how can we know without testing? And accepting this master's accounting of optics, simply because of his authority, would be just as risky as accepting Plato's or any other authority. He suddenly spun and pointed at the boy who started. Now, Ptolemy, he tested. His experiments are well recorded, and I've reproduced them here. But he started with an assumption that Plato was correct. He believed in emission and moved to learn more about the nature of optics with that belief as a foundation. We would be better served if we did not allow for assumptions, but rather question things until we had our answers proven. The sheikh stared at the boy, who was so flustered that he stared right back. The man snapped his fingers. Let me hold your attention with a demonstration. I'll darken the room, and I'll show you at once that the geometers were correct about their lines, and Aristotle was correct about the medium. First, let me light this lamp and draw the curtains. He did the things he said, and soon the room was lit by only a single flame of oil. In the dim light, he held up a box that had no bottom and a small hole drilled in one side. He lowered it over the lamp. I've made a cover for the lamp that should show us the path of light traveling in a straight line. Now just a little help to make the medium visible. Here he tossed a powder into the air. The boy could now see, emanating from the hole in the box, a single beam of light cutting through the cloud of powder. And as I move the cover, you see that the line of light moves as well along the wall. Clearly, the light proceeds from its source. Demonstratable? Provable. As are the angles of reflection when I shine the light at the mirror. The beam moved over one of the standing mirrors, and the straight line of light now bent at an angle. And if I move the mirror, the angle of light moves. The boy watched the light move across the wall of papers, cross the corner, and stop on the inflated bladder. And when the light strikes the eye, it carries with it the form of the object, allowing sight. The room suddenly flooded with light as the curtains were thrown back. The sheikh stalked forward, clapping his hands once. You see, the demonstration is valuable, and it reveals much, but does it reveal the same to you as to me? If you begin by assuming Plato was correct, then what you learned would be influenced by that assumption. If you begin by assuming Aristotle was correct, then you might learn different things, leading to different conclusions. But if you begin with no assumptions, if you first ask light how it behaves, and keep the questions of the eye for another time, then you're removing opinion from the study of light. Now you're able to learn about the nature of light for its own sake, and only then use that information to address the mysteries of vision. Do you see? The boy looked up at the mad builder and swallowed. He suddenly remembered what he was supposed to have said and raised the tray. Would my master like a sharp of milk and honey? The man started, then smiled. He reached down to take the tray. Ah yes. Yes, I have worked up quite a thirst. This story is how I imagine Ibn Al Haytham, known in the Western world as Al Hazen, spent his days while under house arrest. He wrote The Book of Optics during this time, in which he not only effectively addressed one of the most persistent problems to plague our understanding of vision, he laid down a foundational work that can be directly tied to the development of what we now call the scientific method. Al Hazen was a political prisoner, a genius mathematician, and in many ways the world's first scientist. He was also, undoubtedly, a philosopher. And so are you. So you're a philosopher? Let me think. My name is Chris, and I believe you have a philosopher inside you. They may be hiding or have a small voice, but they are there. And I'd like to introduce you. The scientific method. Today it's practically part of the woodwork. Even if you don't run into it consciously in your day-to-day life, you're generally aware of what it is and you're touched by it countless times in a day. You've got a supercomputer in your pocket, you've got ubiquitous technology that would have been a fever dream only a hundred years ago. It's not a far stretch to say that you owe the existence of all modern conveniences to the scientific method. Which means you owe a debt to Al Hazen. Not just him. There's a long line of thinkers and doers that have contributed, many of them philosophers. Natch. But before we go time traveling down the line, let's take a beat and examine the scientific method itself. Generally, it goes like this: you observe something in nature that piques your curiosity, you ask a question about how or why this thing happens or the way that it is, and then you try to figure it out using what you know about the world, how the world works, and you come up with a hypothesis, you test that hypothesis, you record your data, and then you publish it so that people smarter than you can test it, and eventually there comes a consensus that, yeah, this is the way this thing works. That's what you and I learned in school. I didn't really appreciate the genius of it back then. I just filled out my science project paperwork, got my C minus, and then went back to reading the two towers. It wasn't until I'd lived a lot of life and began to appreciate the importance of thinking carefully about things, that I started to see that the real value lay less in, hey, we figured out refrigeration, and more what protects the process of figuring out refrigeration or anything else. The key is in the name, the scientific method. It's a process, a generally agreed-upon process for helping humans understand reality. We humans are really, really good storytellers, you see, and our brains are perfectly wired for creating narrative. But the brains don't really care if something is true or not. I don't know if you've heard that claim that the brain can't tell the difference between a real experience and an imagined one. I think that's a key component of neurolinguistic programming and Tony Robbins process, that sort of stuff. But that idea is sort of sniffing around the point here that our brilliant super-powered brains also have some pretty superpowered vulnerabilities, many of which center on bias. Al Hazen calls this out repeatedly in his writings. He wrote a book called Doubts Concerning Ptolemy, and this is a paraphrase from that, where he says The duty of the man who investigates the writing of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and suspect himself as he performs the critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency. Alhazen clearly respected authority. The old masters had it going on and he was picking up what they were putting down, but he had the presence of mind to spot the gaps and question assumptions. That's why I picked him to write that story about. Well, at first it was the drama about his feign madness and house arrest, which I should probably explain. See, this guy was already a genius, mathematician, and a big successful figure in the ancient world, and he got it into his head that he could fix the problem of the Nile River, which constantly was flooding. So he went and he pitched this idea to the caliph in charge of the region, and he was hired for the job, he started working on it, but considering this was the year like 1010, he soon realized that the technology of the day wasn't up to his imagination. He figured out the math and everything, but he couldn't make it actually happen. And considering that the reputation of the caliph in charge was someone who didn't take it well when people disappointed him, he decided to leverage a little lateral thinking and uh decided he would go mad. Luckily for him, the culture of the time was such that they treated mental illness as illness and something to be treated. And as a result, he wasn't executed, but instead put under house arrest. After the caliph died, he got his freedom back and he was able to publish all the delicious science and philosophy that he'd been working on. So that story naturally caught my attention. But as I was researching all the likely candidates of the philosophers and other thinkers that had contributed to the development of the scientific method, we're talking Plato all the way through Newton, it became clear to me that Alhazen's contributions provided an obvious turning point. He wasn't alone in these ideas, but in the book of optics and other works, he produced not only great science, but great thinking about science. So this is the part that fascinated me. I I suppose that some part of me realized that science kind of came out of philosophy at some point, but it wasn't until I really started digging into it that I learned that science wasn't a thing way back in the day. When philosophers would focus on the material world, things like our bodies, the way that the sun worked, the material stuff of the universe. They called that natural philosophy. As I was reflecting on this topic, I remember that a buddy of mine had often mentioned in different points through the years, how important the scientific method was, and the fact that he wasn't a scientist kind of made it unusual to me. Probably the only person in my life who actually routinely brought it up. And I thought I would ask him why.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

That's what keeps it honest. That's super, super important because we as individuals have biases and often make assumptions that might not be true. Everyone, including even the most respected scientists, is susceptible to self-disfection. So I would say, in general, the scientific method is important because it's the most honest way we have to discover the reality of the world around us.

SPEAKER_01 17:47

Tom had more to share about how skepticism played such a strong role in his life, especially as a magician. We'll bring him back on a future episode when we talk about philosophy and magic specifically. So let's roughly lay out a timeline for the development of the scientific method. And what I think is cool here is that it you can sort of map these developmental eras based on kind of what the focus of those particular scientists or philosophers were contributing at the time. And of course, there's a lot of overlap, and this is very sketchy. Just a few interesting points in the development. So if we go way, way, way, way, way back, we're talking pre-Socratic. There's a fellow by the name of Thales of Miletus, and a lot of people consider him the first Greek philosopher or first philosopher in the Greek tradition. And his major contribution was getting us to start thinking about the natural world as a natural world and not something that was um the providence of gods and mysticism. He was saying, look, the the natural world has natural laws. He started to use math to explain things in a way that could be repeated. He had a lot of parlor tricks. He could measure the height of a pyramid by its shadow, he could predict solar eclipses. He was kind of a big deal. Then we get to the Socratic and the Platonic era. These guys, as you know, were the big thinkers, and they essentially helped us develop rules for thinking. They got us down the path of how to think well and then apply those rules to the natural world. And then you get the math guys, the geometers. So you got Euclid, he's the one who came up with the vision in straight lines in the shape of a cone, and the math worked out, even though he had the emission theory wrong. And then you've got Ptolemy, who actually tested these things. So it's kind of cool is that you can test with math, right? You could, if you are Euclid and you get the geometry right, then someone on the other side of the planet who understands how math works could test it and say, Yeah, that's that's correct. But then Ptolemy came along and and tested other aspects of things. He did a lot more experimentation. And of course, Al Hazen, our hero, he was one of the ones who said, look, you just can't take, or you shouldn't, take something that an authority has said and just assume it's true. If it doesn't make sense or if it is questionable in any way, even if it's connected to and part of something else that you know is true, then you should set it apart. You should split it and look at these things individually. He basically began to get us to focus in on bias, both external and internal bias. And then we get Francis Bacon. Now Bacon began to lay out a philosophy of science. He took I don't know if it was directly inspired by Al Hazan or not, but he he took that idea about bias and got specific with it. He wanted to get specific so that you could look out for things, and he wrote something called The Idols of the Mind. He listed four of them. There was the Idol of the Mind, which is a bias that occurs simply because we're human and we're wired that way. The idol of the cave, and those are individual biases that come about due to your specific lived experience, idol of the tribe, which is the idols, the biases that come about based on your culture, where you live, and what society you're a part of. And then finally idols of theater. And those are idols that are that come from Accepting a grand explanatory system, wholesale, like an ideology. We see a lot of that in today's world. Honestly, all four of those idols influence us and impact us every day. So there's something to watch out for. And then you come to Isaac Newton, who turned the scientific world on its head. He was born into a world that was already buzzing with bacon, which is how I like my breakfast burritos. When he grew up and was getting into science, everyone was already talking about bacon and his idols of the mind. So Newton took that and got a little more specific in how to apply rules for approaching science that are getting us closer and closer to the scientific method. So he wrote a book called Mathematical Principles and Natural Philosophy, and in that he wrote out four rules of reasoning that basically state how to go about thinking about scientific things in the best way. A way that will lead to truth by simplifying your thinking, looking for consistency in the natural world, and by accepting evidence, but standing ready to revise. So these science guys are carefully thinking about the world, but not always thinking carefully, which is where the philosophy side of things comes into play. As Tom pointed out, even the most devoted scientists can err in their thinking, which is why we have not only the scientific method to help, but also the community of science checking everyone's work. Another fascinating aspect to me is how the developmental process in science is sort of mirrored in academic philosophy, which makes a lot of sense considering philosophy was the nursery that raised and shaped science. There's been centuries of tiny changes and small corrections in both fields. Putting in better controls, making better observations, having more humility. The major difference is that science generally seeks to test the world to find better and better answers, while philosophy seeks to test ourselves and the mind, seeking better and better questions. Carl Sagan said that science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge, which I love because in both philosophy and science there's a deliberate care about the method and approach, an installing of internal checks and balances, all in the pursuit of what is real. And this is so important, because here's the sticky wicket when it comes to science. Something can only be proven true provisionally. Once something is tested enough and the consensus is large enough, we generally accept it as being true. But the greatest of scientific and philosophical minds are not only not afraid of being challenged, but welcome it, because they know that it is in the testing of ideas that they gain their worth. If new evidence arises, then that should be tested too, and what was once provisionally held as truth may need to be revised as well. Einstein said that no amount of experimentation can ever prove me right. A single experiment can prove me wrong. Al Hazen, Bacon, Newton, they're all singing the same song about authority. If someone has something of value to say, if they've proven that they're worth listening to, and you find yourself maybe even admiring them and their work or their point of view, it's still really important to not simply take everything they say as the gospel truth. You gotta test it for yourself. Use your own scientific method to prove or disprove their hypothesis about the way the world works. Al Hazen says, don't trust anyone, not even me, without testing. You have an internal bullshit detector, which can be a good place to start. In today's world, you can get a hundred messages a day telling you about how the world works, what product solves what problems, what people want you to think. So the next time you hear a claim on TikTok or in a group chat or in the break room, even if it's coming from a trusted source, and you pause and consider the veracity of the claim for yourself, do me a favor. Say hi to your inner philosopher for me. So you're a philosopher?

SPEAKER_02 26:42

Yes. I think very deeply.