is all knowledge tautology?

Great Debates
21

Well yes, of course. Nobody denies that. The salient point is that we have no evidence that such a system exists.

No, that isn’t even close to being true.

People have gone looking for evidence of an underlying system in all the likely places that such evidence should be. And they have failed to find it. That is pretty string evidence that it doesn’t exist. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when something should leave evidence and none can be found.

In contrast there people have gone looking for evidence of God in all the likely places that such evidence should be. And they have failed to find it.

What does that suggest to you?

Uh yeah. It was.

An argument is a connected series of propositions intended to establish a fact. What you posted in the OP was an argument.

22

Blake,
People REALLY respond well to rhetorical devices and debate tactics that have been used to death. It’s REALLY helpful to talk down to people when they are just asking questions…

“The question (I) refuse to answer?” You mean the one from the SAME POST just now? WOW. I’m talking about something we have Newtonian Laws–a thing so “certain” we went ahead and called it a LAW, and you rhetorically bring up some other concept involving “chance” then say that’s what I believe.

why?

I’m honestly here because I’m seeking to better understand several debates that admittedly didn’t happen in cyberspace so no, you can’t be privvy to them.

I’m just trying to weed out the misconceptions on both sides as best I can because I care enough to better understand it all.

I’m not looking to verify some dogma or prove some point. I simply am looking to understand some core concepts that I feel (and have been shown to honestly have been) mistakenly presented to me. So let me break down the host of problems thus far:

My statement was dropping a rock will yield the result of falling literally 100% of the time. I asked if you would bet against it? This is based on the Newtonian Laws of Physics and seems to be a fairly acceptable outcome in perpetuity.

Now you want to equate that to something reliant on chance, a coin flip contest? What’s the point you’re trying to make? Are you saying that a rock falling or flying has the same probability of a coin landing on heads or tails?
Because we both know that’s not the case.

I sense a strong attitude of “setting the new guy straight”–

Oh, and since you asked–I am young. I’m only 30.
I wasn’t stating any absolutes or debating in favor of them–I in fact am the one saying I feel like we can understand things better and better in time because of progress. The rebuttal against me was “no, NOTHING IS KNOWABLE.”

Moving on–
After spending the afternoon discussing this with the initial debator (from real life) I understand things a lot clearer than I did before.

For example, he is the one who initially debated that a human can get pregnant and anything can happen because of QM.
Either he doesn’t understand the implications of QM or you guys don’t or something–but that’s the disconnect. His stance is QM indicates anything and everything can happen…

His debate was literally the first exposure to the concepts of QM I’d ever heard—and it was in rebuttal to my statement that “things simply make sense in this reality, in this world. Humans get pregnant and have baby humans, not donkeys or dragons or robots or kittens. ONLY HUMANS.”

I made that point clear here, but instead of reading the words “puppies” or “small ships” or “dragon cats” and conceding that, in fact humans never will have those things, you had to find ANY POINT TO ARGUE and took it to evolution? Just for the sake of being contrary?

My point is valid: humans have human babies–not something random or absurd. Things simply make sense.

That was my point. The friend who brought QM into is the one who states that QM proves anything can happen for no reason.

I DON’T EVEN HAVE THE CAPACITY TO DEBATE OR UNDERSTAND QUANTUM MECHANICS.

I don’t know how to be clearer than that–so don’t try to shout me down about how QM doesn’t affect things on the post-atomic level.

I’m simply stating that the rebuttal to my 'things make sense" remark was “no, they don’t: because QM.”

His rebuttal–to me, to you, Blake, and to Superfluous’ contention that QM only affects thing sub-atomically is “cancer.”

He said that cancer can only be understood down to radiation, at which point we simply don’t know anymore about why or how beyond that. It simply is just because–which is his example of TRULY random occurances (which i was arguing don’t exist on our observable level of existence).

That is probably a debate you two should have or at least a new thread–but I need to be clear that I accept what is being said here about QM to be more likely simply because it makes more sense to me.

Fair enough?

The next big problem in the real-world debate (that I was seeking to clarify here) has been resolved, which is that “knowledge” was simply being misused by my debator.

He was considering “knowledge” and “instrinsic truth” as the same thing: “if we know it, it is truth, but nothing can be truly known, so truth is unattainable.” That is the argument presented against me.

I get that intrisict truth is beyond our grasp due to perceptions, but just as i debated with him, just as you cleared up here, we can KNOW things. We can accept the data sets and because of this we can function in reality.

So the largest portion of this whole thread’s point is cleared up right there: semantically, he shouldn’t be saying “knowledge is the same as intrinsic truth.”

I can see in retrospect there was a shifting definition which locked us in a semantic loop.

As for the rest of this–I’m not smart. I’m just trying to get a better grip on this whole “nothing is knowable” debate–which is not true. Right? we simply can know a lot of things due to scientfic method/repeatable outcomes/etc?
I understand the complication of me presenting both sides to a debate, but I can’t make the come and argue, i can only try to explain it all.

SO, for clarity, Let me start this thread all over:

I believe that we can know things in this world. Because of scientific method, because of obtainable data, because of repeating constants. As such, everything seems to be causal (thus far) and things simply “make sense.”
Perhaps what we know isn’t considered intrinsic truth, but it is for sure ostensibly true.

Is that flawed? Or am i simply using the wrong terms?

Is QM fully out of the loop? Because, again–I was told "yes, things make sense, UNTIL QM. Which means THINGS DON’T MAKE SENSE

23

This board is one of the smartest groups of people and is my default place when i have really “smart people” questions–
but it’s full of the smuggest, most pompous people of any board I’ve been on.

Hamster I know, and Superfluous is genuinely answering questions, but Blake–it just seems like this is an ego thing for you.

Can you just help me to understand better? That’s all i want. If i felt like I DID understand all this, I wouldn’t have come here to ask.

24

Thank you. I try to be clear to help myself and other people too. :slight_smile:

I think that what you’re having a problem with is that any number of ridiculously improbable scenarios might happen, but you don’t really have a grasp of just how improbable those scenarios are. I don’t blame you, because I think grasping these probabilities is beyond all of us (since they are so tiny), but that does not mean that we can’t rely on “common sense” or something like it to make “real world” decisions.

25

You’re right, that’s just so hard to wrap my head around.

Also, I think a major disconnect is there’s sort of a practical way of looking at things then a scientific way…I think the initial debate was a mixture of the two that didn’t obey either.

it DOES mean we can’t rely or DOESN’T mean we can’t rely?

edit: by “initial debate” i mean the real-world debate that brought me here.

26

To be frank, I changed the wording because I’m not sure. What I’m fairly confident in stating is that our intuitions about reality and morals are the way they are because they are generally effective in relation to the universe. If they weren’t, we as the beings we are would be extinct by now.

This a completely amoral (not immoral) statement, just to be clear.

27

It’s worth noting that Newton wasn’t 100% correct, though he would have been if the speed of light was infinite. Since the speed of light is not infinite, but just very very very fast, some minor refinements to Newton’s were called for. This didn’t mean Newton’s laws were discarded, just enhanced because our instruments and observations had become sufficiently advanced to take note of the minor limitations when observing objects of immense size (i.e. stars) or objects of immense speed (i.e. photons). I’m sure some theory will come along that refines Newton and Einstein and will prove useful when we start measuring even more esoteric objects like black holes and tachyons and such.

Anyway, our knowledge is anything but arbitrary and tautological. In fact, we’re steadily building on it and refining it as our tools improve.

28

Bryan, your concept of knowledge seem strongly in line with my own, which is the clarity I seek.
You articulate it much more clearly than i can.

And I understand Newton’s Laws are not intrinsic truths either–I’m not claiming that.
However Newtonian Law in regards to a rock always falling when dropped is not equal to the same exact princple stating a coin will always land on heads simply because it did the first 5 times.
That is the rhetorical trap laid by Blake–“if you believe a rock falling 100% simply because it’s never NOT fallen in the history of time, then you also have to believe if a coin comes up heads five times it will forever.”

That doesn’t even seem applicable since a coin has observably come up not heads in history.
However a rock has never “come up tails” so to speak…
But hey–an apple and an orange are both fruit so I guess we can compare them, huh?

Moving on…

Bryan–
You touch on a point i keep making (in my ongoing real life debate)–but it is shut down by my friend. I said we’ve had to overturn Laws and previous held theories that seem patently “known” because of the progress of science and technology.

Heliocentrism, for example.

My statement was that in QM, we might at some point learn more to the extent randomness is no longer is random, much the same way the tajectory of a bounced superball is not random yet would appear so to someone who doesn’t account for microscopic phenomena that affect the tajectory.

What I mean is tiny factors affect the ball’s bounce. But the more we learn, the smaller the level we can observe and test. The better the technology, the better we can understand what’s really happening and for what reason.

I get shut down by him because he says there’s math indicating we know some stuff as much as we can ever know it and it simply is “just because–random.”

So on any level–be it QM or higher–does true, actual intrinsic randomness exist?
Or could it be that nothing is honestly random, but only appears random because we lack further understanding (which could come as we advance with time)?

29

I wish i could most clearly articulate this.

Let me kick this dead horse just a little while longer:

*I wonder what will happen if I drop a rock. *

Let’s say i don’t guess or dream up what might happen, I simply want to observe what will happen. Let’s say I simply record my observations. 100% of the time, the rock falls. Infinity times, over and over.

Why is it necessary to dream other potential outcomes? Why can i not just rely on what i measure?
To me, the concept seems to mean “ok, anything I can dream up that MIGHT happen deserves a numerical value simply because i dreamt it up.”

As I understand it, this immediatly drops my measurements from 100% to slightly less, because the less-than-a-millionth chance of this pointless idea i dreamt of what ‘could’ happen.

But why bother dreaming up impossible outcomes at all? Why not just rely on the measurements themselves?

30

If you just want to record what already happened, there is no problem. But if you want to predict what will happen in the future, you need to assign some probabilities to potential events. Probabilities are all about the future, not the past. The past can help you assign probabilities in a more informed way, but the certainty of the past doesn’t necessarily transfer to the future.

For example, we know that on this particular earth-like planet, life exists. Can we conclude that there is a 100% chance that life exists on every earth-like planet we find, given a suitable definition of “earth-like”? No, we cannot. (Unless your definition of “earth-like” is “contains life”. :stuck_out_tongue: In which case, yes, it’s a tautology.)

Basically, the gist is that the past is certain, the future is not. Measurements measure the past, probabilities measure the future.

31

Well, I actually got most of my argument from an excellent essay by Isaac Asimov called The Relativity of Wrong. There’s also an excellent chapter on heliocentrism in Martin Garnder’s Mathematical Circus. Geocentrism is not a bad model, if we assume the only moving objects in the sky are the sun, moon and visible planets, while the background stars are fixed points on a slowly spinning celestial sphere, but the telescope and the beginnings of serious astronomy gave us additional information, such as Jupiter having moons of its own, and that the stars were not a uniform distance from Earth. Adding this knowledge to the geocentrism model meant adding vast complexities, while the heliocentrism did not, which is why it ultimately won out. And strictly speaking, the name “heliocentrism” (implying as it does that the sun is the fixed center of the universe, as geocentrism did for the Earth) is not accurate either, once we realize that the distant stars are themselves suns and we occupy merely one corner of one galaxy which itself is not the center of anything, assuming a “center” of the universe even exists.

Anyway, I suppose arguably we don’t “know” anything, we just create models based on our observations and refine those models as our observations improve, but that kind of argument tends to lead toward us all being brains in jars (or there being just one brain in one jar, with each of us assuming we’re that brain and all other “people” are just simulations) and what good is that?

32

i love this quote…it simplifies things so much for me. See? Termonology is SO important.

33

(note to experts: look away)

Here is another answer to your questions: because of experience. Dropping a rock might always seem the same to you 100% percent of the time, but experience tells us otherwise. Why? Small rocks. If you take a small enough rock, experience tells us that some percent of the time we will see it go the wrong way. Small enough, and the rock might go the wrong way 49% of the time, if you look close enough, for a short enough period of time. Make a slightly bigger rock, or look for a longer period of time, and that probability might go down to 10%. Make the rock bigger… 1%… and so on. So from experience we have strong reason to believe that a very large rock has some very small but non-zero probability of not falling (for some brief period of time).

34

Are we talking rocks the size of dust mites, here?

35

look. away.

ETA: More like rocks the size of electrons.

36

Well, its the insistence on lumping such objects into the “rock” category that invites confusion, contradiction and oversimplification.

For that matter, going the other way while clinging to a fixed idea of what “rocks” should do is problematic, also. A watermelon-sized rock is a fairly unchanging object that conforms rather passively to various expected physical laws, but the same material scaled to the size of a large asteroid begins to exhibit new behaviours, like a noticeable gravity well. The same gravitational effect emanates from the watermelon-rock, but it is trivial enough to be ignored so we pretend it doesn’t exist and if the rock appears to be attracting other objects to it, we assume other causes (like the rock is magnetized).

That minor effect becomes impossible to ignore when the rock is asteroid-sized, though, and the rock tends to conform to a spherical shape (something the watermelon rock could never do) and attract smaller objects to itself. If the rock gets even bigger, additional effects (always present but usually trivial and overwhelmed by other effects) kick in and the rock might become massive enough that its gravity causes its center to heat up. Go further and the rock might experience some spontaneous fusion. Further still and light starts to noticeably bend around it.

Newton’s laws are just fine for everyday objects, including rocks. There are, however, additional forces at play, such forces only becoming apparent when the rock is very small (to the point where quantum mechanics starts running the show) or very large (where relativity does).

37

Nah, I think you are inviting confusion. I warned you to look away :wink:

The point is that we have very strong experimental evidence to suggest that even macroscopic objects obey quantum mechanics (they are, after all, composed of smaller objects) and therefore we expect on experimental grounds that a rock will not necessarily always fall. You don’t have to rely solely on inductive reasoning.

38

I think I’m failing to grasp a very core concept of scientic reason.

Why do we need to predict some imaginative outcome of what will happen?

Sticking with the falling rock experiment–in order to determine what happens when one drops a golf ball sized rock, why do I need to dream up potential outcomes?
Also, at what point have you dreamt up enough possible outcomes to freakin stop and just SEE what happens?
Also, speaking on just a basic level, a level of creativity is required for this process as well, no? As in you have to be able to conceptualize the rock flying up to even wrangle it as a posibility. This is a big snag for me…so much stuff has thus been even theoretically impossible to imagine until we witness it, so I can pretend in my mind that someone might not even be able to conceive of a rock flying up, especially having never witnessed it.

The last few posts have indeed affected me. I guess I would now say that we can, in fact predict nothing–only assign a measure of probability to it. I hope in this sense i “finally get it.”

However, how one arrives at said probability is (probably) something I’ll never fully grasp–because it seems if “falling up has a probability of less than 1 in a million,” then that probabilty changes in an absurdly small number once i think up a second, third, and infinity other potential outcomes.
Is that right? Or is there just a unified pocket of probability that encompasses “every last single potential outcome?”

Can literally NOTHING have the probability of 100%?

39

dontbesojumpy – yes, according to quantum mechanics (which is a very well-tested theory for almost a century now, and the cornerstone of particle physics), you cannot predict with absolute certainty any specific outcome of an experiment. You must lower your expectations: you can only predict the probability of any specific outcome of an experiment. As usual, the great physicist Feynman said it best:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

So don’t worry that it sounds odd. It is odd.

40

Well, we don’t need to, but it’s one of the best usages of science :slight_smile: We as humans like to have some idea of what’s going to happen when we perform some act.

You don’t have to, because in anything but particle physics bordering on pure philosophy, the overwhelming probability (much, much, much more, unimaginably more, than 999,999 times in a million) the rock (if it’s of a size and weight that any English speaking human would reasonably call a rock), will behave according to Newton’s laws.

This is your fundamental error. The probability does not change at all because you think up a new scenario [paraphrased, but I think that’s what you mean]. Reality is what it is, and what we think is true is what we are trying to improve, in science. In other words, if we can think of new scenarios that don’t contradict other observed facts and can be tested, then it may be that the probability always was higher or lower. But what science in general tries to do is build a model that approximates the real world. If our theories are demonstrably contrary to reality, then it’s the theories that are wrong, not the other way around.

Logic and maths (which are pretty much the same thing) are 100% true and provable. And they are that way by definition. There are no theories in logic and math, only hypotheses and proved, accurate facts. Well, and sloppy definitions.