I am also working with Artificial Intelligence, Adaptive systems,
computer simulation and the like,... But I do not think this is the next
stop of the way towards "post-humanism". It is a "new" kind of
processual archaeology, and it has its sources in the so called
"Computational Philosophy of Science", by Herb Simon, Paul Thagard, etc.
Computers and software are only tools. Simulations are models and not
surrogates. I suppose that no one working with Virtual realities
pretend substitute real data by virtual models. The problem is not on
the method, but somewhere else.
The first problem between processual and post-processual approaches is
in the concept of "Truth". I imagine that even the most
post-procesualist accepts that it exists a real world out of him/her.
For me, Science is a way of reasoning, and not a set of data and
knwledge, is a way of knowing how is this world, and how I can make
things in it. Post-modernism is not well developped in natural sciences,
because the problem of "truth" is a relatively minor problem: If the
"truth" is how the world is, then what I need are instruments to
discover the world and to insure that the world is exactly like the
model produced by the instruments.
Society exists, like the world. Of course, I am a strong materialist,
rejecting any view that ideas exist by themselves. Society is a group of
people acting together, exchanging matter, energy and information. The
goal is to know how is society, and then how we can act on society.
Our goal should not be to know the past, because we cannot know
everything that once happened. As social scientists our goal is "modern
society". An historic problem is not a question about the past, but a
question about the origins or formation process of some present entity.
An for this task, Science is perfectly coherent.
I do not want to know why some people in the past made something, but
why my society is like it is. What I analyze are the sourcres of
collective action. I can make simulations, I can gather archaeological
evidence about actions performed in the past, not because I am
interested on the past in itself, but on how this action generated
consequences that today are still alive.
Society is a dynamic system, and I want to know how it works. This is
not a "functionalist" or "positivist" approach, because I know that
causal processes are not necessary observable. We need indirect
evidences, theories and simulations to build models of social dynamics
and causality. But nothing will be valid, if the model has not any
relationship with "truth", that is, with what the social world really
is.
Obviously, much of social theory is a interested view of what someone
need to control society. But, Galileo once said ".. and however it is
still moving". Some people can produce wrong theories, they can say that
"anything goes", but there was a cause, maybe very complex, and we can
study it, because the causal process is still with us, producing
evidences.
History, Archaeology, Social Sciences are scientific edeavours because
it exists a necessary connection between the past and the present: the
present has been made through causal process which are still active in
the present. The past is not like the present, but there is a causal
connection between both.
Juan A. Barcelo
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