From: mikel@Apple.COM (Mikel Evins)
Newsgroups: rec.martial-arts
Subject: Re: More ki/qi/chi & science
Date: 23 Dec 92 00:11:43 GMT
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA

In article <1992Dec22.175434.16582@srg.srg.af.mil> schan@birch.srg.af.mil (Stephen Chan x4485) writes:
>
>	My goal was to point out
>	a) the difference between formal distinctions, and what happens in
>everyday life amongst normal people

I haven't yet seen this difference pointed out in such a way that I
can understand it.

>	b) the political/social aspects of science

I noticed you implying that these aspects existed, but I didn't
notice any explanation of what they were or how they were
important in the questions under discussion.

>	Probably. I may have overcommited on one of my arguments - I was trying
>to discuss one of the problems with isolating philosophy from psychology,
>sociology and politics. My argument was against excessive categorization and
>specialization.

So you are saying that scientists are biased against the idea of qi
because they are excessively specialized? That wasn't clear to me
before. I'm not sure I see how specialization contributes to
this particular alleged bias.

>	Actually, many of those fringy ideas are slowly creeping into the
>realm of respectability - I saw a news piece on new funding for meditation,
>yoga, hypnosis and related stuff by the NIH. But I would tend to suspect that
>they will discard the qi paradigm for a more respectable western paradigm. Or
>maybe (like in acupuncture) they will adopt the the techniques without a
>satisfactory theoretical model to explain the phenomena.

Here it looks like you are confusing scientific enterprises with
things that aren't. Who is the 'they' who accept acupuncture?
Doctors, perhaps? Doctors are not (in general) scientists, and
clinicians do not conduct scientific investigations as part of
their practice.

>>For the most part, theoreticians don't write about metaphysical existence, at 
>>least not in their published results.  They mostly care about mathematical 
>>descriptions and experimental results.  
>
>	Have you relegated "qi" to the realm of metaphysics? And why is that?

The question of existence is a metaphysical question by the definition
of metaphysics. I find it hard to make sense of the phrase 'relegated
"qi" to the realm of metaphysics.' Literally that would mean that he
had claimed that "qi" was a concept like truth or meaning, used to 
evaluate the relevance of a proposition or an argument. I don't think
anybody is claiming that about qi.

>	I'm arguing that scientific circles suffer from conservatism, and that
>they are not as purely rational as the "scientific method" would indicate. I
>don't think I took the position that science is dominated by ideologues (but I
>*will* say that ideology is a factor in most institutions)

And I'm arguing that science must by its very nature be conservative, for
the same reason that it must use Occam's Razor to winnow explanatory
hypotheses: to avoid being forced to take seriously an infinite
number of arbitrarily complicated descriptions.

It is logically possible that there is no gravitation, and that
instead a vast number of undetectable spirit entities capable of
volitional acceleration move objects in such a way as to make it
appear that there is gravitation. It is possible that the universe
is only ten days old, having been created with the appearance of
being much older. It is a priori impossible to disprove these
'theories' but we don't take them seriously because there are
alternative accounts of existence with equal explanatory power
that are conceptually simpler. This is the same sort of
conservatism that science engages in. I am personally satisfied
not to have scientists trying to invent invisible spirit entity
detectors until something occurs to give them a good reason to
invest the effort.