Some thoughts from Claire Berlinsky’s father.
I’m not sure that I believe that all men are mortal.
This was interesting today, because I was thinking about writing a piece about Michele Bachmann and Marxists. I’ll let you figure out the relevance.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I imagine on some blogs, it would make more sense to say that Claire is David’s daughter.
From Berlinski père: The proposition that all men are mortal looks very much like the proposition that all photons have mass.
Well, first, the evidence is that photons are massless, not massive. So it would be more correct to say that “all men are mortal” looks like “all photons are massless”, because otherwise we are comparing an ostensibly true statement to an ostensibly false one. I mean, we find examples of mortal men every day. But photons with detectable mass have not been observed.
Second, current measurements at best place an upper bound on the photon mass, just as current experience places an upper bound on human lifespan. The tightest experimental limit suggests that the photon mass is less than 3E-27 eV. So one is tempted to make Berlinski’s analogy, that we might have men living longer and longer, challenging the threshold, just as better experimental apparatus challenge the threshold of the photon mass.
But one key difference that Berlinski fails to note is that the challenge to lifespan limit is upward, while the challenge to photon mass is downward. This is what allows the possibility that an experiment will provide a value for the photon mass, thereby falsifying the proposition that all photons are massless (just consider that experiments in recent years have shown that neutrinos are not massless!)…. But no observation of long human life would falsify the proposition that all men are mortal.
So one is tempted to agree that “all men are mortal” is not a scientific hypothesis. BTW Berkinski’s point is not whether the proposition is true or false, but whether it is possible for it to be true without being “falsifiable”. This is an intriguing example because it is easy to believe in the truth of the proposition without all the rigamarole of science and arguments about what it means to be scientific.
I would propose that the proposition could be falsifiable only in the context of an agreed-upon experiment that demonstrates immortality in a finite amount of time. There are two key ideas here. One is that “falsifiability” is only meaningful within a given (Kuhnian) paradigm. The other is that there may in principle be measurements other than actual lifespan that demonstrate immortality. If that seems improbable, consider how computer programs work. Do computer programs always terminate in a finite amount of time? (All the ones I’ve ever started have, except for the ones I’m running right now.)… But we are all familiar with the infinite loop! Some programs are provably non-stopping. We don’t have to start the program and wait around for it to run forever. We can examine the code and show that DOWHILE(1.EQ.1); ENDDO will not stop. In the same way, we could imagine a fine-grained examination of some individual’s DNA that would allow us to conclude that the person was immortal (of course, not just aging-resistant and disease-resistant, but presumably bullet-resistant, nuclear-detonation-resistant, heat-death-of-the-universe-resistant, etc.) In that context we could allow “all men are mortal” to be scientific in the Popperian sense….
It may or may not be useful to note that many, if not most (and it may be most) of the people who have ever lived have never died.
I’m reasonably sure I can design a test for their immortality that they will all fail, to whatever confidence level you specify… well, up to at least six sigma….