Calling the Oracle

ekstasis:

notational:

“We’re going to see scientific results that are correct, that are predictive, but are without explanation. We may be able to do science without insight, and we may have to learn to live without it. Science will still progress, but computers will tell us things that are true, and we won’t understand them.

[…]

For centuries, scientists have solved problems with flashes of insight. But while the equations that automated scientists offer are very good at making predictions, they are often inscrutable to human scientists. We may have to program computers to explain their discoveries to us. Otherwise they will become more like oracles than scientists, handing down mysterious utterances to us mere mortals.”

— Steven Strogatz, Voices: What’s Next (via stoweboyd)

Science is as different from computation as poetry is from science. Science is a method, computation is brute force. Never before has science so badly needed ontology, needed philosophers and poets and artists and never before has science (as a discipline) been so hostile to their input.

It should be noted that chemistry was once alchemy, physics simply a branch of theology. The “insight” of a scientist isn’t computation, it’s a lot more like mysticism and it won’t be more computation that translates oblique transmissions from a computer into understandable language, but ostension, the act of translators and logicians. Or else, we really will be left with petabytes of oracular prophesy from our supercomputers. In that case, it will only be those of us capable of dealing with aporias and high-weirdness who will make any progress.