I’m not sure about that. If nothing really exists, the scientific method still seems to work for everything that appears to exist.
No, that’s not true. There are limits to our ability to observe the universe, and some scientists believe the laws of physics could be different outside of our observable universe. And for that matter the laws of physics had apparently not yet come into being for the first few moments after the Big Bang. For that reason, some physicists think we’ll never be able to describe what happened before that time. (I think it’s about 0.1 * 10[sup]-43[/sup] seconds.) What you’re saying applies to our observable universe only. And even in that case I think the assumption remains that if the laws of physics did change, there would be a deducible reason. There’s no reason to assume they’ll change tomorrow, but that’s based on a long history.
Science doesn’t know things. It’s a methodology. What people are saying is that we have a lot of evidence that scientific can give us accurate descriptions of elements of reality, so there is reason to believe that works.
You know, the quality of discourse on this board is surprisingly good.
a) have your friend look up the problem of induction. Hume’s problem. We know that poincare and Mandelbrot are onto something. But we also know that our current understanding of gaussian probability is wrong.
b) look up Positivism. Positivism is an intellectual error.
c) look up “Scientism”. Read Hayek Nobel Lecture.
d) have him read the other postings in this thread because some of the people are saying very wise things.
So no. He is not right. He is a member of the church of scientific secular humanism. and it is a church.
That’s a bit like saying the reality of a colour-blind person is not the same as the reality of a person with normal colour vision; of course, there exist certain questions in the sphere of experience of the one that have no saliency to the other, such as ‘Does this shirt go with these pants?’, but there still is an objective reality to the frequency of light, and even to how both person’s eyes (and brains) react to light incident on the retina. And using systematic analysis, model building and -testing, both would eventually come to the same theory of light, regardless of their individual contexts, as would the frog and the tiger; to me, and it seems to a good portion of other posters in this thread, this is a far more fundamental definition of ‘reality’ rather than what is and isn’t important in certain arbitrary situations.
I think we can’t say the world we live in doesn’t exist, because even if it was an hallucination or some kind of matrix-like it still certainly exists, right? Given that we think therefore we exist, wherever and whenever we are must exist, even if it was only on our minds? What we probably can say is that our reality exists, and for this reality science seems to have some knowledge about it due to the accurate predictions it makes, and that there could be more realities, to which science has not yet made contact. Correct me if i’m wrong please.
It seems a lot of of the discussion is on defining reality.
Reality is *whatever *is the source of my perceptions. It might be an hallucination caused by my own brain, or a Matrix-like simulation, or a natural system of forces and particles, or something else that’s totally unimaginable. But as long as it behaves consistently – and it appears that it does – then science works. Science doesn’t tell us what reality IS, it tells us what reality DOES.
While I would concur that that which is behind the curtain of perception is the same for each, I would strongly differ that our models would end up the same so long as we each used the process of systematic analysis, model building and testing.
The shape of our models depends on the means by which we perceive and the features of reality in all its infinince we happen to be in contact with. A whale with the scientific method may model the world in a very different way than do we, yet its models may be no less valid.
We be blind men at the elephant of reality grabbing to feel what we can and modeling on that basis. A limited method to be sure. But its the best crack at describing reality we got.
They must at least be equivalent with respect to the predictions they make (and from an instrumentalist perspective, that already would make the models identical). Otherwise, one is wrong (well, or both are, if none agree with observation). And I’m not too sure that there always exist multiple models of fundamentally different content that make the same predictions.
That sounds about right to me. It’s possible that everything we think we know about the universe is wrong and that there is no way for us to ever find out about it. We can’t rule that out. But the question is outside the realm of science, so I tend to just shrug at the idea.
"For example between Newtonian and relativistic physics. They can both describe the workings of reality very, very accurately but from a philosophical point of view they are completely different and even opposed.
From Newtonian physics we infer that objects and forces are concrete in time and space and have a fixed location. But form relativistic physics we can infer that time and space are not ‘concrete’ in the way we think they are. That is that two observers can only agree that something happened not at what time or what place it actually happened.
Though both these may describe the physical interactions similarly there philosophical implications are completely different. And it is from these philosophical implications that we derive our world view. These are what I am concerned with. If we argue that Science can accurately describe reality in its current form then we say that its philosophical implications are also correct which if accepted can have huge impacts.
This is just a small example. The difference between Newtonian physics and Quantum physics is vastly different and philosophical implications are huge. For example: Science has always assumed that objectivity is real and that things are knowable. What quantum physics tells us is that this is not possible and that our belief in an objective world may even be misplaced…"
I would dispute the first portion right off. Newtonian physics describes the bit of the elephant we were able to grab at the time it was created (call it the trunk) very well. As time went on we were able to touch more of the elephant and while Newtonian physics described the trunk well it did not work to describe the tail and the body. Newtonian physics failed to explain what became observable and a new model supplanted it. That model may yet be replaced itself as we observe new things that do not fit its predictions, or it may be merely modified. The process of self-correcting our metaphors, of creating models that progressively suck less and less, continues.
Philosophically the issue remains the same: science it turns out isn’t about “faith”, it is about regulating our levels of doubt. The belief that there are some things that we cannot know at the same time as we know something else merely informs how we regulate that doubt at a very particular level of analysis.
Also, since you are clearly quoting something, care to source your cite?
So as we are actually residents of Middle World (Dawkins point) not residents of the microscopic one, one may look at philosophies that use quantum physics, but it is really silly to assume that they are valid or operating in the world we are interacting with.
I assume he is quoting the friend he mentions in the OP. Of course we could participate in this conversation firsthand instead of by proxy if SyuRi would invite his friend to post here.
While the philosophical implications of a scientific discovery are interesting, they don’t affect the correctness of the discovery. People can easily have worldviews which do not match reality. In your example, the direct implications of choosing one over the other are going to be minimal.
If someone is upset by a relativistic world view, or a quantum one, that is their right, but that doesn’t make Newtonian physics work at relativistic velocities. You might ask your friend what the implications are of fundamentalists being upset by the worldview based on evolution.
Well, the philosophical implications stemming from myth, superstition, and outright fabrication have had some pretty bad impacts, historically. What you want from the world?
I’m not sure quantum physics says that the world is unknowable or that there’s no such thing as objectivity. It says, among other things, that you can’t measure certain quantities to arbitrary precision, like a particle’s position and momentum at a given instant, and that you can’t predict certain events, like exactly when an unstable atom will decay. It’s still possible, at least until we discover otherwise, to know all the fundamental “stuff” that the universe is made of, and how it all interacts.
Besides, people were already comfortable with that general kind of uncertainty long before quantum physics. For one thing, you can never measure any quantity with infinite accuracy, so there’s always margins of error in any real-world calculation. Also, some physics equations are poorly behaved (very non-linear), so any imprecision you have in the inputs (and you always have it) will be magnified in the outputs. So if by an “objective world” you mean a world where it’s possible to know every quantity and predict every event, even in principle, then that world has never existed anyway.
I think it’s important to note that neither special relativity nor quantum mechanics directly invalidates Newtonian physics; instead, both include it in a mathematically very precise way: if you formally take the c -> ∞ limit in special relativity, it is completely equal to classical mechanics; similarly, taking h -> 0 in quantum theory again recovers the Newtonian world. Formally, both theories are deformations (in a similar way to how an ellipse is a deformation of a circle: ellipses are more general objects than circles, but a theory of ellipses fully includes the theory of circles) of Newtonian mechanics; they are not replacements, but rather refinements of previously existing theory. And that’s just how science progresses, by constantly refining existing models, until it hopefully eventually captures all salient phenomena.
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the OP’s friend is an ardent believer in something that has either thoroughly failed the test of empirical science or simply cannot be tested at all. Lines of reasoning such as this always seem to be the last bastion of those who can’t follow through on what they claim to believe. Existence exists. If you find yourself having to weasel your way out of simple axiomatic inferences like this in order to validate your statements, then that should be a clue that you need to start over.
What’s most telling is that the OP’s friend is attempting to say that simple axiomatic logic has no meaning by using language, which is a logical construct in and of itself. Knowledge has an objective identity which is hierarchical in nature and can’t be contradicted. You aren’t going to be able to learn calculus until you understand the principals that govern why 2 plus 2 equals four. It’s kind of hypocritical to claim that reality doesn’t hold for what you want to believe, but it holds just fine with the language you are attempting to use to describe it.
Well seems we’re going to be proxying for a bit more. In a bit more conversation, he said to me
"Science makes the assumption that :
All things are ultimately objective and based off of material things.
These objective and material things have ‘inherent’ laws that govern there interactions.
Consciousness arises from physical properties i.e. subjective experience and come from objective phenomena.
Now since it has been shown that many different accepted theories throughout the ages have lead to different philosophical beliefs about the world we can see that applying science to our understanding of how reality is, is not correct. Because in 10 years the theory might be debased and everything that we thought before and hence based our beliefs on was incorrect.
We must begin to understand that science does not just affect our understanding of the physical world it also affects the understand of our selves. Because we are a extension of the ‘physical’ world.
In this way science is a philosophy. It is directly related to our understanding of truth and reality. And just like with all other philosophies it makes certain assumptions that are unfounded. Assumptions I have stated before.
Therefore, we must begin to see science as a philosophy so that we do not mistakenly put our beliefs into it. "
I don’t have much knowledge about all the philosophies he’s talking about, though i’d feel it’s different to compare science with a philosophy but i can’t quite explain why. Hopefully you guys have more information about this.
Though both these may describe the physical interactions similarly their philosophical implications are completely different. And it is from these philosophical implications that he believes we derive our world view. These are what I am concerned with. If we argue that Science can accurately describe reality in its current form then we say that its philosophical implications are also correct which if accepted can have huge impacts.
Have they repealed the Central Limit Theorem while I wasn’t looking? AFAIK it still holds. I suspect you’re referring to some restricted use of gaussian probability, since you’re somehow associating it with Mandelbrot and induction, but you might want to clarify.
