[⚠ This is an old unfinished draft ]
We’ve been beating around the bush and comparing science to other things. Let’s talk of science itself now.
Possibly the most fundamental thing that makes science tick is this:
Humans can agree.
They don’t need to. In practice they often don’t. But in essenceIf I tell you "There is an orange and there is a pear on the table.", I don't need to give you a banana to trust you agree with me that this implies "There is a pear on the table.". Chances are very high that this is so obvious to you that it sounds very silly. More they can.
Science is not establishing what people should agree on, nor requiring people’s agreement for anything, nor even attempting to make people agree. It’s the other way around. People can agree, and science owes to that – its existence, the sense it makes, and its subtle sensualAnalytic:= like a typical academic or encyclopedic article, technical research report or grant proposal, including the more graphic material presented in figures. Non-symbolic:= anything else that is just as accurate and complete, no more illustrative and metaphorical, but less linear, usually less verbal and more sensual. Typically, non-symbolic information is delivered through a sensual (visual, auditory,. . . ) experience. It expresses in a compressed form specific pieces of understanding, concepts or ideas that otherwise might need to be delivered by way of lengthy analytic descriptions. More sort of splendor.
Not only does science stem from people’s innate ability to look at things the same way, perhaps more importantly, it concentrates on it – not on the fact that they do/did/might/will see things the same way, again, just on the fact that they can. Science makes this matter. It builds on the possibility by formalising it, exercising it and challenging it. That’s precisely why disagreement is so crucial to science. There is only so much science that can be done within a group of (one or several) people who consistently look at things the same way. Together, people who already agree can confirm the things they agree on, and perhaps impose their perspective on those who don’t agree with it. What else? To agree is not to exercise the ability to agree, it’s to have exercised it once. In order to exercise it again, there has to be a contradiction at hand.
If we want to keep having proofs of humans’ innate ability to agree, we must value instances where they don’t – and do what essentially science is all about: put this ability of ours into action.
Thus, possibly the second most fundamental thing that makes science tick is this:
Humans see things differently.
But aren’t differences in perspectives mere representatives of differences in individuals, responsible for failures of the state of consensus? Nope, not when you know how to work them. Formalise them faithfully and they start telling on relations among individuals and ways to navigate between their diverging views.
Humans that navigate together tend to look in the same direction for a while. The rest is magic: things come out of looking in the same direction for a while.
So what science proposes is to navigate together between our diverging viewsnot to manufacture 1 general perspective with the power of replacing several pre-existing diverging ones / -1 general perspective on which previously disagreeing people can agree - nor even to look in the same direction More, identify the contradictionsand actually more than that, confront our perspectives deliberately to anything that can contradict them, whether it be another perspective or uncooperative parts of the natural world as we perceive it. That's how science is practiced: first, you faithfully formalise a perspective, then you let it go a little, live its own life, let it make you fall for it a little, until soon, bAm! It collides with the another formalised perspective! Then you gather your spirits, and shift your attention from your pet perspective to the pricking contradiction at hand evidenced by the collision. Then, you make sure you have that precisely formalised. Then More at hand and turn them into something else – somethinga.k.a "information" More tangible that humans share for a while and possibly build things out ofeg new telephones, smart dishwashers and postit stickiness. Those things come into existence not because scientists happen to have the ability to make them and because we must give scientists something to do. Rather, they come into existence as a response to how we humans are presently collectively experiencing and envisioning the world. The primary reason for GPS's not to have existed in the Middle Ages, is not want of the state of technological advancement needed to produce GPS's, obviously, otherwise humans would have been deliberately working to get to that state as soon as the Middle Ages. I don't think they were. I think none of the things they were deliberately doing had deliberately anything to do with GPS's. More, aka “information”.
So how clear is it now that science is (one of) our best chancesof course, to see that you must stop abiding by the intrigues and trivia of academia and the academicised world's, if you haven't already. More at not entertaining contentious states? By definition, science is the art of turning disagreement into something else available for us to share and use as long as it lasts. And since science doesn’t ask us to all agree and all see the world the same way, it ensures us we won’t bore ourselves to death. It will keep us disagreeing and destroying, and conforming and constructing.
We’ve established that humans have the ability to look in the same direction, and that they also generally don’t consistently. We’ve mentioned that consensuses are suspicious with respect to science-making. Let us add that for similar reasons, lasting dissensuses are too. Disagreeing is not making science. Science cannot operate without equivocity, but without brand new instances of it, it withers. Without brand new instances of equivocity to make brand new common sense out of, there are no brand new pieces of information to produce .