Dimensión 4: Comunicación interna
II. Marco metodológico
3.1. Resultados descriptivos
PG, Sunday, January 13
A rmenta’s rock wasunderwater when I set out in the morning. Behind it forty miles of coast arced north to the city of Santa Cruz. After an hour of driving I was in Santa Cruz and exiting the coast highway to climb into the mountains on Route 17.
Officially, 17 is not a highway. The turns are tighter than the rules allow and the road is banked to dump you off as often as to keep you on. On the uphill side there’s no shoulder, just a wall of rock. The other side has a narrow shoulder between the road and a reliably fatal drop, unobstructed by guard rails.
That makes Route 17 like a lot of other roads in the Western U.S., but it has something most of the others don’t. A world class rush hour. Living in the Santa Cruz Mountains is an alternative for Silicon Valley workers.
In California alternative living is not enforced, but it is expected. Frequent power interruptions, tree falls, landslides, and narrow roads halfway up cliffsides are things Californians will pay extra for. Real estate in the near wilderness of the Santa Cruz Mountains sells for big city prices. It’s a land of expensive off road vehicles that spend most of the time stopped in traffic.
There’s no rush hour Sunday and I was soon over the summit. The descent into Silicon Valley often stuns drivers hitting it for the first time. It’s the scarp for the San Andreas Fault, and it is steep. The valley looks like a forest from above, if you dare take your eyes off the road to look at it.
Before World War II, it was called the Valley of Heavenly Delight. The mountains I was driving over block most of the rain. Then the main product was oranges.
After the war, the sunny climate attracted the defense industry. Technol-ogy followed. By 1961 Jack Kerouac, combining an alcohol binge with a re-turn visit, could lament urbanization as an accomplished fact. “Citycitycity,”
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he said. The liquor brought Kerouac the right word for everything before it killed him.
In 1971, the Valley of Heavenly Delight was renicknamed Silicon Valley.
Twenty years later, I arrived. By then, imagining Silicon Valley as orange groves was like imagining Manhattan during the Ice Age.
I’d picked a hotel I knew, so it surprised me when I couldn’t find it. I saw nothing but semidetached homes in close formation. I looked for the hotel, its berm, its lawn just wide enough for a couple of trees and a pylon sign.
No sign of any of them. Did I take the wrong exit?
The third time around I spotted the temporary sign. It was in a thicket of others all pointing into the development of semidetacheds. Straight off the sidewalk, the driveway became an alley through fourplex canyons. If the front doors opened out they’d block traffic. Another temporary sign directed me into a side alley that snaked off to the left. At the end of it was my hotel.
The hotel grounds were gone, every last blade of grass.
I could see nothing from the balcony of my room except freshly painted wood frame and windows with the sticker still on them. It wouldn’t bother the developer to hear I didn’t like his new places. I couldn’t afford them. I closed the curtain and hauled out my laptop and some printouts.
I was pretty sure what I was going to send Sue, but I wanted to read it first. It was the 1950 article by Carl Hempel, twenty-two pages long.
The Self-verification Argument is basically a one-liner. I was curious how Hempel was going to stretch it out.
Common sense is just philosophy that doesn’t know where it came from.
The Hard Facts Philosophy that many think is their own personal gem of innate wisdom has founders and started in a specific time and place: the meetings of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s. Shelves groan under the books written about the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. Those books call it by several fancy names. “Logical Positivism” is the commonest.
The Hard Facts Philosophy maintains there are only two ways to deter-mine truth. One is observation of the material world, and the other is logical deduction. The idea behind it was to take scientific methods and apply them to the rest of life.
Every philosophy responds to an emotional need. The Hard Facts Phi-losophy claims to be an exception, which makes it a good example. No scientist has ever worked or could ever work using the Hard Facts method, much less live their life by it, though many have claimed to do both.
The Hard Facts Philosophy has a basic, glaring flaw, one big enough
The Valley of Heavenly Delight
to make it stand out as the big loser in any lineup of history’s flimsiest philosophies. The Self-verification Argument. The Hard Facts method is not a hard fact. It does not verify itself. In fact, according to its own rules, it is wrong.
Look at its two rules for truth. Is the Hard Facts method an observed fact of the material world? It’s a theory, and you can’t see, hear, smell, taste or touch a theory, so clearly no. And you can’t logically deduce it from material observations, either.
Carl Hempel had attended meetings of the Vienna Circle. I’d heard a lot about his 1950 article, but I’d never actually read it, and I didn’t want to pass it on to Sue until I did. As it turned out, Hempel couldn’t make the Self-verification Argument fill even four pages, so the rest of the article dealt with other problems with the Hard Facts Philosophy. Hempel certainly could pick and choose. For one, Gödel’s Freedom Theorem demolishes the Hard Facts Philosophy. Math can’t explain itself, and since science requires math as an explanation, science can’t explain itself either.
But to refute the Hard Facts Philosophy, you don’t need to get even that complicated. Why do science? There are reasons, but none of them are scientific. Science requires you to believe the world is comprehensible. Why believe that? There are reasons to, but not scientific ones. Why expect the laws of nature will hold five minutes from now? After all, we know what’s true of the past is not always true of the future, and science doesn’t tell you that it is. Science can’t explain, justify or motivate itself. It certainly can never explain, justify or motivate us.
Science has no reason to pick a fight with God. If explaining science also gives people a reason to wake up in the morning, just what is wrong with that? Science never made us push God aside. Blaming science for our issues with God is like blaming the gloomy fourplex canyons that surrounded me on the guy who invented the hammer.