Series Progress


Introduction


In the previous monographs of this series, we have given the reader another perspective on science and also defined several interrelations that exist between science and reality as perceived by humans. Even though this series is open to everyone and the majority of people can easily understand, we approached these topics with the scientist’s eyes and tried to give the readers a guideline of what could be the “philosophy of science” perspective.


In this series, we are going to continue on this journey and approach the concept we all have heard once, “Philosophy”. What is this concept, how do we understand it, and how it relates to science? in the previous article, we stated that philosophy plays a major role in Science by driving its courses. Here, we will go in deep.



Reflection


We mentioned in the previous articles the fact that after we are born, we have to go through a learning process from our environment. We come as a complete blank paper per se. And then with time, information starts to leave its marks on us slowly but surely. After a good amount of time, we accumulated enough information that help us interact with the society we are living in related to the era. Because we have already sensed sometimes that it could have been awful if we were to live 100 years in the past with our current habits and concepts.


So this learning process that starts from our early childhood continues up to a certain point where it finally finds stability. This means that after some time, what is happening is we are no longer “learning”, we are “inferring” the world in which we are living. This viewpoint brings a lot of questions but what it tries to convey is that, as a scientist, we should pay deep attention to the way we approach the interpretations and even the constructions of the experiments we make.


Let us take an example. If you are a bit versed in Machine learning or statistics, there is the notion of fitting models to predict future data points outside the known ones.


As modern human beings, we come out of this world as this model that does not know how to fit the tremendous information of “society” correctly. But with the help of our surroundings, family, schools, friends, etc., our line (model) starts to get a sense of the data points and starts to better fit them. What is interesting is that, after a moment, this fitting reaches its best performance according to the values, either moral or religious, set by our environments. At this point, what happens to us as human beings is that the learning “stops” and we now start inferring from each case that comes our way. We become the “children of our society.” The model we have built helps us navigate through the requirements of our lives, and when a very different case faces us, we infer the best response we can without changing the shape of the model learned throughout our lives.


Flower
Fig.1: Linear Regression fitting (Yahya Ansari-Medium).


Now where is the place of philosophy in such a schema?


Believe it or not, philosophy was present in the example we shared earlier.

Philosophy is this approach that helps us continuously challenge not only our current states and values but also the line of our evolution. When we were kids up to our early adulthood, Philosophy was represented by all those instructions, recommendations, and guidance coming from our environment. They were there to help us assess the quality of our state and growth in society by comparison to what was there and is still relevant, a concept of “similarity” that is well-known in artificial intelligence.


So for an individual, Philosophy has been part of and integrated into his life, consciously or not. But when it comes to a scientist, the question becomes extremely urgent. It becomes urgent because, as a scientist who has already acknowledged his limits in terms of knowledge, continuous learning becomes crucial. Learning and “learning to unlearn” every moment becomes exactly the path of a scientist.


This expression “learn to unlearn” then is just the consequence of Philosophy. For a scientist, Philosophy never stops. Every moment, he has to question not only himself, but also the direction of his works, and all the things that brought him to be who he is currently at any moment.


If this process of questioning and self-evaluation has to happen continuously for a scientist, then how does the comparison, which is crucial for growth, however we define it, happen? In the first phase, this was related to the expectations of society and our environment. But at a certain point, the scientist reaches the stage where he might break the expectations of society to continue the learning process. This is generally crucial for new knowledge to enter the world.


What becomes then the reference for the scientist to assess his growth if he has to go beyond those set by his society? In Artificial intelligence is there any model that goes beyond the capacity of any cost function defined?


As we realize now, this question becomes tricky as we have to go into other concepts that are linked to the bottom of our lives. Which are “bad,” “good,” “wrong,” “right,” “true,” “false,” etc…


Philosophy is to assess all those elements at the same time to push forward our understanding of life, by so doing us. But who or what defines those elements? How the assessments of such elements be done beyond the realm and capacity of society’s expectations, can such growth happen beyond society’s expectations?



Conclusion


As promised, this monograph has been made short and straightforward. The place of Philosophy has been made clear in our lives as scientists. But why talk about it? As a scientist, our objective is to push forward the quality of life for humanity. This cannot be done if, as scientists, we do not understand the current limits of the society we are part of, how they relate to us as scientists in our research experiments and the way we interpret them.


By having a deep understanding of those limits, there could be a possibility of changing progressively or dramatically the way we live. Those concepts of truth, bad or good, will be discussed in the next monograph related to Traditions and Religions and will clarify, from the perspectives defined at the beginning of the series, how this manifests itself in Science and how it impacts scientists.