Absoluteness or relativity of scientific knowledge (My speech at the 5th World Congress Geoversal Civilization) A. Voin 27.7.18 Ladies and gentlemen, organizers of the Congress and personally President of Congress Zhang Lan! All speakers in front of me, like speakers at other similar congresses, talk about the need for freedom, justice, spirituality, morals, etc. But everyone understands these words in his own way, even if they speak the same language. Some, speaking of spirituality, mean faith in God, and everyone - in his God, moreover, only with the treatment of the doctrine, which his confession gives. Therefore, the Sunnis consider themselves spiritual and the Shiites - spiritless, and Shiites - on the contrary. And members of ISIS do not consider spiritual neither those nor the others if they do not recognize the world caliphate. Liberals consider spiritual only those who are for democracy and human rights, again only in their understanding of these rights, i.e. first of all, the rights of sexual minorities, the rights of at least adults to watch porn, the rights of prostitutes, etc. Communists and socialists also consider only themselves to be spiritual, because only they are really concerned with the rights and happiness of the working people. All sorts of nationalists also pretend to exclusive spirituality and even fascists justified their atrocities with spirituality in their understanding. The same applies to all other terms used in all such congresses. Hence the effectiveness of all these congresses: they talked, broke up and forgot. But the absence of a common language and understanding of each other among representatives of different religions, confessions and ideologies is only one of the reasons for the crisis of modern mankind and the inability of its leaders and thinkers to find a way out of this state. Another reason, (related, however, to the first one) is the problem of absoluteness - the relativity of scientific cognition, put into the headline of my speech. What I mean? Let us assume that all those present have found a common language and understand the draft of a geoversal civilization in an absolutely identical and unambiguous way. (Although from previous speeches it is clear that for the time being this is far to be so). But understanding the project is not yet an agreement with its truth and correctness. By the way, it is clear from previous speeches that there can be no full agreement in this case. For example, in the draft there is a provision on the need to unite all cultures into a single, universal human. And most speakers were for the diversification of cultures. It follows that there is not only a general understanding of the terms that appear in the draft and the discussion, and therefore the project itself, but many Congress participants have their own version of the project or in general an alternative project. And in general there were many different projects in history, how to make mankind happy and guide it along the right path. These are different religions, projects of bourgeois revolutions, Marxism etc. and each of these projects still has many supporters convinced that no other project is needed. Moreover, today there is simply a flood of all kinds of projects of this kind, from more or less serious, to all kinds of fantasy, composed by the thinkers on the Internet. The question is why it is necessary to accept the draft of the geoversal civilization and not to stay under the communist project or to accept the project of some Vasi Pupkin from the Internet? Of course, the authors of any project say something about this "why". But there is no convincing explanation for all "why", otherwise one project would have been accepted by everyone, and the rest have been rejected. But that's not all. Let's say that not only everyone present at this Congress, but all in the world, would agree that the geoversal project is the best and the only correct one. Would this mean that by implementing this project, humanity would have come exactly to where the authors of the project promised? The experience of history teaches us that the majority and even all are not necessarily right. There were times when everyone believed that the Earth is flat, then that the Sun rotates around the Earth, etc. Hence the question arises: what is the general relationship between our knowledge, the scientific knowledge, first of all, (because the reality in which we live is long determined primarily by science) and reality, to what extent can we rely on scientific knowledge, or in other terms, to what extent is our knowledge absolutely and in what sense it is relative? Schools dominate today in Western philosophy, above all post positivism (Kuhn, Feyerabend, Quine, Popper, Lakatos, etc.) relativizing scientific knowledge. They argue that science does not give us reliable knowledge, that scientists, representatives of different paradigms, do not have a common language (and if scientists do not have it, then where can we find it for politicians, public figures and ordinary people), that the notions of science are not tied to the experience, that there is no difference between science and not science, between theory and hypothesis, and any theory will sooner or later be refuted. Etc. At the same time they refer to the real phenomena of science, in particular the fact that science does change its concepts and conclusions from time to time. (Newton's absolute time becomes relative for Einstein, and the velocities previously formed according to Galileo's formula begin to take shape according to the Lorentz formula, etc.). Of course, there are philosophical schools that are trying to resist post positivists. But none of them has been able to explain correctly mentioned phenomena of science, refute post positivist statements, solve the problem of unambiguous mutual understanding, define a clear boundary between science and pseudoscience, explain what in scientific knowledge is relative and what is absolute and in what sense. This state of philosophy only aggravates the above problems of society and humanity. And while it lasts, mankind will not be able to accept any project of a way out of the crisis, including the geoversal, and at the same time be sure that it has chosen the right path. My unified method of substantiating scientific theories gives the solution of these problems (Единый метод обоснования научных теорий. Direct Media, M. - Berlin, 2017, 2nd edition). Naturally, I can not explain it in this short speech. I will dwell briefly on only two points. First, the basic elements of cognition are not words, as the relativists of scientific knowledge and their opponents and ordinary people believe, but concepts. The words of any language are fundamentally ambivalent, and all the endless attempts to achieve their single mining, in which such giants of thought as Hilbert, Russell, etc., participated, are doomed to failure. Concepts, though they are defined, as a rule, by words of language (but not necessarily, it is possible by formulas, symbols, drawings, etc.), as I show, can be single meaning determined. For example, the concepts of a point and a straight line are defined in Euclidean geometry with the help of its axioms quite unambiguously. There are other ways of unambiguous definition of concepts. But for complete mutual understanding, it is necessary not only to unambiguously define concepts, but also to uniquely link them to the real number of objects of reality to which this concept will relate. The fact is that any uniquely defined concept, even such as a "straight line" in the geometry of Euclid, in reality there does not correspond to any real object. Even light rays are bent near large masses, and since the gravitational field exists at any point in real space, in principle there are no rays of light absolutely corresponding to the axiomatic definition of the straight line. In a unified method of substantiation it is shown how an unambiguous binding of uniquely defined concepts to a real set of objects can be carried out if these objects have the measurability of their properties and the units of their measurement. (The latter occurs mainly in the natural sciences). The second point relates to what kind of truth science gives us and what is absolutely in it, what is relative. The overwhelming majority of not only ordinary people, but even philosophers and scientists want to receive from it the absolute so-called ontological truth (and they are terribly disappointed that science does not give it them, or they try desperately and unsuccessfully to overcome this obstacle). For example, people want to know what an electron is. And science first tells them that the electron is a very small charged ball. But then it turns out that this is not a ball, but a charged cloud, smeared in an orbit around the nucleus of the atom. And after that it turns out that this is not a cloud, but a package of waves. From this we see that there can be no question of any absoluteness of ontological truth. From this, of course, it does not follow that the ontological truth given by science has nothing to do with reality at all. But this is definitely not an absolute reflection of it, but which one, I describe in the book mentioned. But the main thing is not this, but that there is another kind of truth, which science gives us, and this truth is in a certain sense absolute. And it is this sort of truth that we need to solve our earthly problems. There is such an expression: "science is one that, on the basis of past experiences, allows us to predict the results of the experiences of the future." This is what we actually need from science and rational science is able to provide that in a certain sense absolutely. I will explain, what I mean, by example. Regardless of whether we assume the electron to be a ball, a cloud or a wave packet, but if we calculate the voltage in the electric current circuit using the Ampere-Ohm formula, then we predict the result of the future experiment with a given accuracy and probability. Moreover, both accuracy and probability can in principle be increased as much as desired. But this remarkable property is guaranteed to us only in the event that we make our prediction on the basis of a theory substantiated by a unified method of substantiation. To such theories belong the theory of current and Newtonian mechanics, and many other physical theories, although their justification was not made formally by a unified method of substantiation, since it has not yet been explicitly presented. But it existed in the natural sciences as a stereotype of naturally scientific thinking, like the grammar of the language sits in it before the language specialists present it explicitly. But since this method has not yet been presented explicitly, in modern physics and other natural sciences there are a lot of theories that only claim they are able to predict reliably the results of future experiments. But in fact they can not guarantee that to us, since they are not substantiated by a unified method of substantiation. As for the humanities and philosophy, there is still no this method at all, including at the stereotype level. That is why we have a number of schools there, representatives of which do not have a common language and are unable to come to a common opinion on any issue. (What we see in this Congress). But it is the humanities, rather than the natural sciences, that should solve the problems discussed at this Congress. I not only presented the unified method of substantiation in an explicit form, but I also showed the possibility of its application in the humanitarian and public spheres with appropriate adaptation. This possibility exists despite the fact that in these spheres, as a rule, there are no units for measuring the properties of their objects (there are no kilograms of love or meters of justice). This is due to the fact that although there are no units of measurement, but commensurability in principle exists and here. (We know which woman we love more, and which less, although we can not estimate it in any units). As a result, although we can not achieve here the same accuracy of predictions as in the natural sciences, such precision is not needed in these areas. I illustrated this possibility on many examples. In particular, in accordance with the requirements of the unified method of substantiation, I constructed the theory of optimal morality («Неорационализм – духовный рационализм», part 4, Direct Media, M. - Berlin, 2015), determinism and freedom theory (Ibid., Parts 2 and 3 respectively) and rational the theory of the spirit (Ibid., part 5). In the latter, I showed that spirit and spirituality do not necessarily have to be good, and that even a good spirit tends to deteriorate over time and how to distinguish a good spirit from a bad one, and what to do so that it does not deteriorate. I also proposed a new interpretation of the Teaching of the Bible based on my hermeneutics, based on the unified method of substantiation ("Эволюция духа. От Моисея до постмодернизма", Direct Media, M. - Berlin, 2015), the beginning of a new macroeconomic theory («Начала новой макроэкономической теории», Direct Media, M. - Berlin, 2014), also based on the unified method of substantiation.