A really mind-bending topic came up dealing with the core nature of reality…the debate is can we “know” anything? Or is everything simply a matter of probability that is, in reality, unknowable?
The example is stepping off a cliff—I say we “know” you’ll fall. It’s predictable–some might even say it’s CERTAIN. The counterpoint to this is that yes, you might fall the first GAZILLION times but on the GAZILLIONTH and ONE time, you might fly off, blip into a warpzone, grow wings, etc etc etc.
But to me, that just bastardizes words into meaning nonsense, abstract things. It
seems to me, the latter argument claims noting is causal, but are instead random.
I’d say our universe is deterministic–
Conceptually embracing there is no attainable truth in existence, wouldn’t it mean there’s no such thing as probability? Because you’d have to concede that the first gazillion falls off the cliff were all singular random results, all percieved reasons for falling were simply coincidental–that falling is contingent on no predictable pattern.
Doesn’t this shut down the scientific method?
Doesn’t the no truth/no real knowledge concept of reality render it dysfunctional?
And yes, I have considered quantum indeterminacy–how in quantum physics things behave randomly–
But at the Newtonian level, things are calculable. Quantum indeterminacy seems to have utterly no bearing on the common-level of the physical world.
An article I read grants that yes, things down there in the quantum realm sure seem to be random and chaotic, but when enough particles get together to actually make matter, everything starts becoming more and more predictable, which means all that randomness is in fact causal.
I’m a moron—I admit it. But it seems to me that this indicates what we call “random” or “chaos” on the quantum level is simply a lack of understanding. Something like not knowing why trees started growing in a field—you could say “WOW. Trees just RANDOMLY started manifesting!” But really, it’s not random—you are just ignorant to seed migration.
Maybe it’s not random, maybe it’s just outside our current understanding of methodological pattern.
A very smart friend and I discussed this. My example is that humans get pregnant and have baby humans. EVERY. TIME. They don’t birth out dragons, cats, dragon cats, small ships, aliens or puppies. It’s always a human baby. His rebuttal was quantum mechanics state that given enough chances, at some point a zebra-monster or anything else WILL come out instead.
I understand he’s semantically debating probability vs possibility. However, until things happen for literally no reason in the physical world at least a few times (like a few dragon cat babies or other absurd phenomena), don’t we have to accept we “know” what’ll happen?
WAIT:
I think i mean “axiom” rather than “tautology.”
Hell, I might even mean “dogma.” I’m not sure what the term is…I think AXIOM because my point is if we ultimately cannot know, anything we call “truth” is simply a belief as there cannot exist PROOF.
As my mind caves in, I wonder why it’s not acceptable to say “yes, we know, 100% for certain”…I mean, if “anything” can happen, “certainty” surely falls under that “anything” umbrella…no?
If ANYTHING is possible, CERTAINTY is as well. ??
No, because probability is a post-facto calculation based on certain assumptions. If a statistician drops a body off a cliff a million times and it always falls, he declares the odds of a dropped body not falling under those circumstances to be less than one in a million.
No. Why would you have to do this? If the body falls a million times, then that is a highly predictable pattern. The fact that once it didn’t fall doesn’t make the pattern unpredictable. it just makes it marginally less predictable.
No, in fact it is the basis of it.
The scientific method has an underlying, explicit assumption that nothing is known with absolute certainty. All scientific theories must have a mechanism for falsification. As soon as something is known with certainty then, by definition, it ceases to be science.
No, because even if the universe were 100% predictable and consistent, our senses are not. As a result there will always be a margin of error in human knowledge. This was established 3, 000 years ago and still holds true today.
That is why Socrates didn’t speak of truth, he spoke of “the truth, insofar as it is possible for man to know it”. Socrates knew damn well that there was no absolute standard of truth and pretty much every philosopher and all scientists since since has agreed with that.
So the scientific method relies instead upon a preponderance of evidence. Science never strives for perfect knowledge, because that is impossible for humans to find. Science instead strives for increased knowledge. It does that by removing all the knowledge that we can prove is incorrect at the time of observation. It doesn’t do it by adding knowledge to an some edifice of perfect knowledge
You can work it out yourself by asking “Where did the first human come from?”. Obviously the first human came from a non-human ancestor. So a non-human woman gave birth to a human baby. By extension, if our species lasts long enough, then a human *must *one day give birth to a non-human baby. This isn’t just something possible. This is something inevitable.
No. For several reasons.
Even if we discount quantum probability, there is plain old vanilla probability to contend with. If someone flips a coin 5 times and they all come up heads, can she declare that she knows the coin always comes up heads? How about if she flips it 50 times? 500? At what point can she accept that she “knows” what’ll happen with the next toss? The answer of course is that she never “knows”. With repeated trials her certainty increases, but it never becomes unity. This isn’t the result of any QM fudge. This is just plain, old, vanilla probability at work. Even in a perfectly deterministic universe this would still hold true, and still mean that she could never accept that she knows the result of the next toss.
Secondly, you ask for absurd things to happen “a few times”. But that isn’t a reasonable request. We have a very short period of human existence, and the events you describe are wildly improbable. We wouldn’t expect them to happen multiple times even if the quantum level probabilities were orders of magnitude more effective than they actually are.
Thirdly, absurd things do happen for “literally no reason in the physical world” all the time. People have fallen out of airplanes and lived. People have been kicked to death by ducks. One man has been struck by lightning 7 times; an absolutely absurd event. Monkeys drifted all the way from Africa to south America on logs swept out to sea in a flood. People get cancer, for no reason at all. A random atom decayed and released a random particle that by random chance struck a random proton in a random molecule in a random cell. And the person dies of cancer in 6 months time. There is no predictability to this, it is truly chaotic and happens without any reaosn at all. And it happens several times every year. Your problem is that you want an absurd event to occur after you predict it. That isn’t valid, nor is it going to happen.
Just because nothing is certain doesn’t mean everything is equally uncertain. Our decisions, our predictions, and our world views are all based on things that are very likely true. But nobody bases anything on the possibility of women giving birth to dragon cats.
Figuring out the probabilities is what science is all about. We used to think it was pretty likely that the sun was a guy riding a flaming chariot through the sky each day. But we dug deeper and found out it is fits the evidence better and is in fact much more likely that the sun is a ball of hydrogen and helium the size of a million earths undergoing nuclear fusion.
That’s not tautology or axiomatic. It took a lot of work to get this far and figure this much out. It doesn’t mean we can’t be wrong. It does mean that, over all, we’re “righter” than we’ve ever been before.
This is partly a question of definitions. If we define knowledge as a belief that is objectively true, then we can certainly know a lot about logic and mathematics, since logic and maths have built-in methods for proving propositions. If we also assume that there is an objective reality, we can also know things about reality. The problem with reality then becomes how to prove that our beliefs about reality are correct.
Which is why natural sciences don’t work with the concepts of proof or even knowledge per se (at least as far as the “mechanics” of the universe go), but on the basis of evidence and theories, and why falsifiability is such an important concept in science; it’s strictly speaking impossible to prove anything about reality, but it’s relatively easy to disprove false theories (by setting up experiments or doing measurements).
There’s a metaphysical question in there too; to be able to do scientific experiments, you have to assume the universe works by in some way following a (probably unknown) set of rules, which again is impossible to prove. If you’re disposed to, you can insert a deity or platonic idealism or some combination thereof here.
It’s certainly good enough in normal speech to say you know you’ll fall if you jump off a cliff. But you’ll have to remember that this is not the same kind of certainty you’d have if you said you knew that 2 + 2 = 4.
And you’d appear to be incorrect.
The problem isn’t about truth - that may or may not exist. It’s about proof. And you can’t have any. You can have strong inductive theories that appear to be so predictive that for the usual practical applications they can be taken as objective truth, but whether or not the theories are in fact correct is another matter (Newtonian gravity is a good example of a theory that pretty much only becomes noticeably false when you’re talking about objects off earth).
No, because science strictly speaking doesn’t deal in knowledge. In fact, “modern” science works the way it does precisely because proven, objective truth is unattainable in practice.
Hm. This is all fairly exactly what I expected to hear, but I’m just trying to get my head around it all.
So—
About humans having non-human babies: you turned it into a thing about evolution. That was never part of the conversation. I’m taking about RANDOMNESS, and the counterpoint made my “non-chaos theory” of human birth is that so far it’s NEVER been absolutely random what comes out. It’s always some causal, calculable creature. Even if at some point a human/next-level-hybrid is birthed out, it’s still somewhat of a predictable creature. But the point was according to quantum mechanics ANYTHING can come out…however in a practical (functional) sense, indeed, no, it’s never been random.
Which brings me to probabilities and stat/core concepts of truth: how is creating a godlike form of unattainable knowledge any different than believing in God? It’s an unknowable, impossible concept—just like God, and at the end of the day, the question to “WHY ANYTHING?” is either scientifically “we can never know/because of the unknowable truth” or if you’re theological—the answer is “God.” Both seem equally as unfathomable and to me both seem pointless because they have no practical bearing on anything at all whatsoever. We ostensibly “know” that so far, everything has had a cause/effect relationship—I mean, has there been anything in the history of EVER that science has said “yup, that happened for literally no reason—so we’re not even going to study it or look into it or even think about it because there’ simply NO REASON IT HAPPENED.” This is why I said the universe is deterministic—is it not a giant mechanism of causes and effects?
That being said, if for all practical purposes something is true 100% of the time you do it, what is the harm in accepting it’s truth? I guess I’m coming at it like this: if I take the stance that a rock will fall when I drop it off a ladder 100% of the time as we are on earth, but you bet something else will happen and the rock will not fall, I would win that bet. “Do you know what happens when you drop a rock off a ladder?” ‘YES. It Falls.” But this statement is simply not true? Because truth is extrapolated to a patent impossibility which has no bearing/practical use whatsoever?
I’ve already granted possibility vs plausibility, but in the functional world, it’s rather moot…until actual random things start to happen, we have a fairly firm grasp on the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of our perceived world. And I also grant that we are flawed in our perception since we are human, but it’s all we have, so saying it’s simply “how things are” doesn’t seem untrue since it simply cannot be any other way…
So, ok. So the concept of knowing ANYTHING is simply an axiom by strict definition…or another way of saying it is something can be impossible to physically disprove yet we cannot accept it as 100% infallible. Because there’s so such thing.
So the answer to the question is YES, knowledge is merely an axiom. Truth is an axiom.
A question about statistics: I’m not a math guy, so bear with me—
In order to apply a statistic to something, doesn’t it have to happen? Someone said the chance of falling off a cliff and flying up instead of falling has a less than 1 in a million chance—how do you come up with that stat? Doesn’t something have to happen at least ONCE before you can create a mathematical equation for it? Or can we assign a statistical probability to any conceivable notion?
Is there a statistical probability of God?
Isn’t the stat for something that’s never happened “N/A?” If we can assign stats to events/outcomes that have never been observed, do the stats become altered because of each new conceptual outcome we can dream up? “it’s a 1 a trillion chance—NO WAIT I just thought up ‘if you jump off a cliff you might turn into Voltron.’ Now the stat is a 1 in a trillion-and-one chance.”
The thing about quantum randomness is that it works on the (sub)atomic level, and that fact alone already pretty much guarantees that quantum effects will have no significant effect on even a single cell (I found a cite claiming about 200 trillion atoms in a single human cell, but that might be off by several orders of magnitude - nevertheless). Added to that, the intricacies of the human reproductive system prevent a lot of the more damaging/incompatible mutations from ever reaching birth.
We assume a “truth” because that seems to be a consequence of the assumption that the universe is working according to rules (and vice versa). If it isn’t, then all bets are off, but so far, the assumption seems to have worked quite well.
I think causality get quite weird at the quantum level, but I don’t know nearly enough to say that for a fact. But causality seems to be something that is pretty hard-wired in our mind. We are superstriciously susceptible to infer causal links for events that happen shortly after one another, and it takes real work to prevent us from making judgment errors in that regard.
None of that is to say that causality is false - it certainly doesn’t seem to be on the super-atomic scale.
You’re using multiple definitions of “truth” here, which may explain why you’re getting confused. What you’re describing is data - i.e. “I dropped a stone 100 times, and every time it fell”. That’s history, or measurements, and the person making the measurements can make sure their statement is true. But you’re also talking about something else entirely, namely the inductive argument that stones, when dropped, fall towards the earth. Which is provably false, but quite valid (not 100% absolutely guaranteed, but so probable as to be certain to anyone’s standard) under specific conditions.
Yes.
Yes - at least, when you’re not talking about abstractions like logic and maths.
Not at all. It’s just that we aren’t capable of determining the underlying “truth” (if there is any) about the real world, so we’re just using the word “knowledge” to mean something like “in our limited experiences, for as long as we can conceive of, this statement is not going to be disproved”. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that, except that it can lead to confusion such as yours.
I’ll assume we’ve all dropped stuff often enough that if the chance really was more than 1 in a million, we’d have heard about it.
Depends on the god. But that’s another question that’s almost 100% a question of definitions. Define me a god, and I might hazard a guess. There certainly are definitions of gods that have a statistical probability of 0 and some that have a probability of 1.
No. The chances of something happening are not determined by it happening. We might get a more accurate estimate of that number, though.
Thank you, superfluous…awesome name, too. Your posts quite help.
So, for clarity, let me explain the debate that brought this about. My stance is that reality (that is the perceptible world as observed and measured as best humans can via science and all else) is “perfect.” This is a misappropriation of Spinoza’s statement that “reality is perfect.”
My point is reality/existence is predictable, which allows us to function in it. The converse of that is a world of pure chaos—you get prego, you might have a who-knows-what’ll-come-out. You step off a cliff, you’ll “who-knows-what’ll-happen.” That would be a world of absolute randomness and chaos—i.e. “imperfect reality.” I grant there’s whatever infinitesimally small percentage chance that ANYTHING can happen, but as it remains wholly unobservable and simply theoretical, the function of reality remains “perfect.”
Don’t start hammer-smashing me because of the implications of the term “perfect.” NOTHING IS ACTUALLY PERFECT.
I mean “PERFECT” as in structured and as far as we can tell, causal. Calculable. Not random, not chaotic, not unpredictable. Everything works together in a symbiotic, absurdly intricate system where everything is contingent on everything else—deterministic. I would abandon this stance and concede IF, at least ONCE, purely causeless random events occurred. So far, even extremely unpredictable outcomes are the result of unforeseen but still observable circumstances—not randomness. Science has yet to find a causeless event that it simply had to give up on because it’s unknowable. All the things we do not understand are being researched because the belief is we can, at some point, “get it” or “reveal the cause.”
For me, this is evidence that there is a “reason.” I have no idea what that reason for a tractable reality is—a god particle, some master energy, “God,” a mathematical super-truth, or whatever else. I can’t claim to know–it does push me towards deism or pantheism…but also things like The Theory of Everything sure seem plausible to me.
The debate against my stance is that nothing is knowable, therefore even tho we get constantly repeatable data, WHO KNOWS. Ok, sure—but isn’t that moot when it comes to the actual realization of reality? As in the practical application of, you know—existing?
Now: stats again.
“a 1 in a million chance of a rock not falling.” Sorry to harp on this—still trying to grasp it. So it’s easy for me to imagine a guy standing at a ledge and dropping something a million times in a row. Or a billion. Or a trillion. Or he stands there and literally drops stuff over and over for a life time. It always falls, 100% of the time. Yet there’s still an allowable percentage for the rock to NOT fall? And it’s assigned a numerical value—hypothetically .01gazillionth of a percent the rock won’t fall? How do you arrive at the numerical value if you have not even one single instance of it ever happening EVER?
So the 1-in-a-million chance of a rock NOT falling is simply an estimation? Not a calculation or measurement?
The chance is not “one in a million,” it’s “less than one in a million” – we cannot, ever, assign a probability of zero, we can only assume that the probability is less than one in however-many-trials-we-conducted (well, we can adjust for the significance of the fact that it hasn’t happened at all, compared to what level of confidence we want, but that’s a bit much for this discussion).
I never attempted to or sought to convince anyone of anything. I concede that perhaps things are the way they are just because this his how things are. But it’s equally plausible and just as impossible to argue that perhaps there’s an underlying system to it all.
Perhaps or Perhaps not–it sort of just comes down to whatever helps one understand it all–you have no evidence this is simply how things are anymore than a christian has evidence of God. So stop trying to make it an argument, nothing here ever was.
Well of course we are not privy to your conversation outside this board. I can only base my responses on what you have said here. And what you said here is provably erroneous…
Why on God’s Green Earth would you expect it to be random? The process of producing a neonatal mammal has about a gazillion checks in place to ensure that the product is a faithful copy of the parent. It is the single most non-random process that I can think of.
Why would you expect the outcome to be random?
Uh, no.
You need to realise that QM indeterminacy breaks down as soon as it interacts with the macroscopic. That interaction causes he waveform to collapse and at the point of collapse it ceases to be random and the probability becomes unity.
The production of a neonatal mammal entails about a bazillion macroscopic interactions every minute. There is simply no way that QM says that the process could ever produce something random. Or rather, I guess it could, but the odds of it doing so, even within the lifespan of a million universes, are still so small that we can’t calculate them.
Some QM events are merely improbable, such as all the particles in a rock teleporting themselves upwards in a series of Planck distance jumps (ie falling upwards). For the mammalian gestation process to produce something truly random, an event far more improbable than that would have to occur several million times every second for 9 months. If the improbable failed to happen that often then the embryo / foetus would be terminated instantly.
Tha tis why the result can’t be random.
It isn;t.
But who, aside from you, considers the absence of certain knowledge to be in any way similar to God? Can you explain to us how it is similar to God, and which Gods it is similar to?
Ahh, I’m guessing you are young. There is a quotation I can’t recall properly from somebody who can’t remember, but it runs something like “The surest sign of maturity is the willingness to abandon absolute certainty and admit ignorance”. And it’s very true.
There’s nothing pointless about admitting uncertainty. That is in fact what gives everything its point. Nor is it unfathomable. We have fathomed quite a lot of the processes of the universe.
Nope, lots of things at the quantum level happen for literally no reason.
Similarly lots of the fundamental processes of the universe happen for absolutely no reason. Light, for example, just “is”. Same with gravity. It doesn’t happen for a reason, it is just something that occurs because of the fundemental structure of the universe. Oh, we can explain *what *light or gravity is, but we can;t explain *why * they are, indeed the question of why light is doesn’t even make any sense.
No, it isn’t. At the most fundamental levels it is a collection of states and probabilities. Light is *caused * a shift in state of particles, but that shift in state itself is perfectly random and indeterminate. Gravity is *caused *by distortion of spacetime, by the distortion itself is simply a state of the universe.
Well that’s very easy to answer.
You take a coin and flip it 5 times, and it comes up heads 100% of the time. I now offer you a bet that the next 10 times time it will come up tails. If it comes up heads every time, I pay you $1 million. If it comes up tails even once, you pay me %1 million. Are you really going to take that bet? After all, coming up heads was true 100% of the time you did it, right? What is the harm in accepting it’s truth?
The fact that you won’t take the bet is proof positive that you don’t believe what you are saying. You know that just because something is true 100% of the time you do it, that is no indication at all that it will continue to be true for the future.
Most of the time, yes. But that is only a safe bet because so many people have seen so many objects fall that the number of trials is huge. As a result the probability is known to be huge.
No. It does have bearing.
Again, I ask you the question that you refused to answer earlier:
If someone flips a coin 5 times and they all come up heads, can she declare that she knows the coin always comes up heads? How about if she flips it 50 times? 500? At what point can she accept that she “knows” what’ll happen with the next toss? At what point can she declare it “a patent impossibility” for the coin to come up tails? And why did you choose that number (N) and not (N-1)?
I really would like your answer to this question, because I think this is where you are going wrong. You don’t understand that certainty increases with number of trials, approaching unity. But it never actually reaches unity.
No we don’t.
Take a very simple system likedouble pendulum. Despite its simplicity, it is totally unpredictable and random. We have absolutely no idea grasp on the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of even this one simple aspect of our perceived world.
So since people perceived the world as flat, it was true that the world *was *flat? And it simply could not be any other way, because that was all they had?
That’s an interesting position, but I don’t think you’ll find many who agree with you.
Our perceptions *are *flawed. That isn’t open to debate. That is why we seek to falsify the results of our perceptions, not confirm them. It is that process of falsification that enables us to overcome the limitations of our perceptions. Our perceptions are not all we have. We also have the perceptions of others and the ability to deduce.
You can have strong inductive theories that appear to be so predictive that for the usual practical applications they can be taken as objective truth, but whether or not the theories are in fact correct is another matter (Newtonian gravity is a good example of a theory that pretty much only becomes noticeably false when you’re talking about objects off earth).