(December 18, 2019 at 4:07 am)Belacqua Wrote: It's Nietzsche who tosses Logos. He claims that the order and regularity we interpret and abstract from the real world is like a dream image --- a falsehood we require to live comfortably. The real, pre-interpreted, pre-abstracted world is, for him, Chaos. This is why Nietzscheans say that most scientists are not yet sufficiently atheist. By assuming that there is a Logos-like order behind phenomena -- even if it's not fully knowable to humans -- we are still full of faith.
I don't think this view is accurate. Science sees regularity that can be used to derive a practical predictive power in most situations (including what we call natural "laws" for lack of a better term) based on probability, but I very much doubt that most scientists see some mystical inherent order that's not emergent from the natural world. Too often, we see patterns that don't apply at extremes of scale or of time, for example. Hence Newtonian physics is adequate for most purposes and is still used for example to do routine orbital mechanics calculations -- yet, it had to be modified by quantum electrodynamics for extremely large or small scales. Similarly our understanding of time becomes useless as we approach the BB and our understanding of the universe is increasingly being subsumed into multiverse hypotheses.
This doesn't mean there's an underlying "Logos-like order" or even a single theoretical model that undergirds everything. It just means our understanding is incomplete at present and in an infinite universe may never be complete -- just less incomplete.
Sadly, our minds seem constructed almost specifically to be drawn to concepts that attempt to "explain everything", such as "Logos-like order". We abhor uncertainty. It is an acquired talent to learn to sit with it.
