Yesterday was the weekly Philosophy of Science Meeting which is held in the Chart Room* next to my office here at the University. We were discussing the idea of a tribe of isolated people who might have a complete understanding of the way the world works. In their view, the sun might rise because they eat a certain type of food or rain might be brought down by a dance held on particular days of the year. These things would be done, the sun would rise, the rain would fall and so the world would have been explained as fully as it needed to be.

The question raised in response was whether these peoples’ view of the way the world works (i.e. their science) be any less valid than our own? We assume we both have self-consistent long-standing viewpoints and that they both serve our needs to date.

I said that our science was better and more complete than the tribe’s. However my position was attacked on the basis that I wasn’t understanding the tribe properly. My opponent’s said I was worrying about the content of their science rather than form. However my point was more about truth than scientific. I argued that we know more than the tribe about the way the universe works. Here I mean universe as in everything that exists and all the rules of nature and not just in the astronomical sense of knowing about space.
We argued the point for a while but didn’t come up with anything very definite since everyone was very bogged down in the ‘primitive’ nature of this tribe. It was also a real tribe that was being discussed and so on the basis that no one in the room actually knew anything about them in any detail it wasn’t a discussion based in anything real.

So I proposed a thought experiment to perhaps make clear the question which I wanted to pose:

Imagine that there is an alien world somewhere out in another galaxy. Not necessarily a specieis of bipedal mammals but merely an intelligent race that has progressed on their own world to some level comparable to our own. We assume that they have a society and that they are trying to learn things about the universe also.

Now the hows and whys aren’t so important but somehow we end up communicating with them. That is to say that we are not polluting the experiment by assuming that we have developed the same communication technology, but we can talk with them on some level.

What would we have found to be common about the universe?

I argued, as an example, that this alien race would have a concept like our idea of prime numbers. Maybe they would have discovered the atom or the speed of light although they may call them different things. My point was that there are some immutable truths in the universe that are invariant of culture or scientific methodology.

The group seemed to generally disagree. We talk about the comparisons of religion and science a lot and so one of them poised a question to me. He asked what I would think if this alien world were to have a story where by a man is executed on a cross to save the souls of all the world. Would it therefore convince me that the story of Jesus is true. When I said no, they deemed me a hypocrite. However my response was that such a story is an historical event and thus would be a remarkable coincidence. However if they believed in God, I said, that would be interesting.

But where as two planets believing in a God would be worthy of study (perhaps something about consciousness leads to a feeling of God, or maybe there actually is one) two planets finding the same prime numbers is not a coincidence. It is a fact of reality that these numbers are indivisibly by anything other than themselves.

Anyway, I have rambled long enough. just thought it would be interesting to share.
*Chart Room is a very grand name for what is essentially just a room.