I am reading Ian O. Angell and Dionysos S. Demetis’s book Science’s First Mistake — Delusions in Pursuit of Theory.

Ian Angell has held a lecture about the book at Gresham College.

It is refreshing to have someone put into perspective many people’s uncritical belief in science’s objectivity and rationality.

Delusion

In chapter 2, the concept of delusion is defined as “an intellectual construction by an individual regarding both the self and entities outside the self, which is taken to be true, believed and used to impose meaning on the world of the senses” (p.39). “Delusion is a decoding of an individual’s sense data that filters, and consequently alters that data on the basis of some predisposition to belief, giving meaning to the world of experience, and thereby enabling non-arbitrary and meaningful personal action” (p.40).

Causality

A fascinating idea is that causality, which is one of the foundations of science, is a delusion:

“Any analysis, therefore, requires a consistency between what is necessarily so (the authors’ shorthand for the unknowable ‘real world’ of phenomena) and the delusions used to give that world meaning. That meaning doesn’t uncover causes in the world, for causality is not in the world, rather a delusion for imposing meaning on what is necessarily so; a pre-requisite/a building block of meaning/logic” (p.42)

Order and chaos

Order (and thus, science) is just a delusion for understanding the real world, which is chaos.

“All order is chaos misunderstood, deliberately misunderstood as delusions, to our advantage. Order (what makes sense to us) is not in the world out there somewhere. That order is artificially constructed by us as a nebulous pattern, a delusion, supposed, and then imposed on the world: ‘supposed’ is used here in both its senses, in that the delusion is inferred and being the way we believe the world to be. ‘Understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature’ (Kant, 1999)” (p.41)