The Lost World, Scientific Epistemology, And Truth

In the final page of the novel The Lost World by Michael Crichton, the sequel to the original literary Jurassic Park, character Jack Thorne ridicules and rejects not only the scientific paradigms of the past, but of the present.  He talks of how some people once thought four humors (not comedy, but four substances that allegedly needed to be in balance) controlled human biology.  He points out how the prominent idea that the Earth is only a few thousand years old gave way to one holding it is four billion years old, a newcomer in a universe approximately 13.7 billion years old--and since the book's publication, in more recent times, it has been posited that the real age is closer to 26.7 billion years.  Thorne denounces photons and electrons and, strangely, self-esteem as constructs of foolish people who think the popular notions of their day must be true.  He is only partly correct.

Logic and introspection prove the existence of self-esteem (literally whether someone regards themself positively or negatively, which someone can immediately perceive within their mind).  Self-esteem is a mental state, and no mental state is an illusion since one cannot misperceive what one thinks or feels--a person can make assumptions that misrepresent their actual mental states, but the thoughts or emotions themselves are directly experienced.  Jack ignores the great distinctions between logic, introspection, and science, also failing to distinguish between scientific laws like gravity or the first law of motion (metaphysical) and the scientific method (epistemological).  As such, he is in deep error about the nature of logical necessity, absolute certainty, and the difference between scientific phenomena which are true even if unknown and the probabilistic, potentially false theories of an era in time.

Thorne is utterly incorrect about the nature of self-esteem, but he is still right that photons and electrons cannot be proven to exist, as he implies when he asks Kelly to hand him one.  He immediately goes further than this to deny the existence (not just the knowability) of these things altogether, which goes past rationalistic skepticism to the fallacious rejection of logically possible things that are not by necessity nonexistent.  Assuming that the same patterns of scientific advancement will always expose flaws in current paradigms (this is not true with logically necessary philosophies like metaphysical and epistemological rationalism, basic theism due to the existence of an uncaused cause, and so on, for they are neither scientific in nature nor unprovable), he says people a hundred years in the future will laugh at the scientific and psychological paradigms of his day.  He also says newer and better fantasies will replace ideas like those of a four billion year-old Earth and photons.

Confusing epistemological unverifiability with metaphysical falsity, he assumes that popular scientific models at basically any point in history are wrong.  Unprovable is not the same as incorrect.  Only adding to his errors, Thorne says that the movement of the boat he is in, the sunlight on the skin of him and other characters, and the people around him are all real when their existences are entirely logically unverifiable.  Seeing something does not make it real beyond one's perception, though the mental experience itself has to exist within one's consciousness.  A mind cannot perceive something it is not perceiving!  It is just that many kinds of experiences do not have to correspond to anything outside of one's mind.  This can be assumed to be or not be the case, but both are logically possible and neither can be proven, though only one of the two could be true and one of them has to be.

Alongside the declaration that the sun and water and people are real, he denies there is anything else, implicitly natural or supernatural.  Consciousness is nonphysical, whatever its causal relationship with the body (no one can escape mere perceptions to see which one really causes the other, only what appears to be the case from a human perspective); it cannot be an illusion because a mind has to exist to misperceive an illusion or to even wonder if it exists.  More foundational than any mind, even the mind of God, the laws of logic are true by intrinsic necessity since them being false would still require that they are true.  From this, it follows that they exist in the absence of all else, which would require that they are immaterial.  Only consistency with logical axioms means that my own existence is possible and it is only due to my grasp of the objective truths of reason that I can know I exist with absolute certainty.

However, it is not as if a great many material particles or scientific laws logically have to be untrue even if they are not macroscopic, as Thorne holds, and macroscopic nature itself does meaning something is true.  Categories like logical truths and the existence and contents of my own mind are not uncertain either way because I both do not make assumptions and realize that they cannot not be true.  Thorne does not know reason or its inherent, full supremacy over science and laws of nature.  Instead, he dismisses practically anything other than contingent sensory perceptions of the immediate macroscopic world as illusions or delusions.  Reason and the mind are more fundamental than the natural world (reason both metaphysically and epistemologically by default and the mind at least epistemologically), and they are not visible to the eye or revealed by touch, taste, or hearing.  There is nothing impossible about microscopic or quantum phenomena given that they do not contradict logical axioms or other necessary truths.  They are just unprovable.