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It seems to me there's a bait and switch of sorts that we play on kids. We tell them science can answer their questions about the world, or that they can use sc
by asark 8y ago
It seems to me there's a bait and switch of sorts that we play on kids. We tell them science can answer their questions about the world, or that they can use science to answer those questions, but it kinda can't. Keep digging and pretty soon you're lost in not-quite-accurate metaphors that may have nothing to do with reality and "we can tell you how it behaves, it's [pages of equations], isn't that good enough?"
It may be (probably is) that "what is this" or "why does it do that" are just meaningless questions, in the sense a child (or adult who hasn't re-calibrated their expectations of what science can tell them) means them. Which is interesting itself, I suppose, but at that point just go study philosophy and art, if that's why you were into science in the first place—and I think it's why everyone at least begins to be interested in science.
[EDIT] in particular it's frightening how fast kids' questions stymie an adult because the adult realizes that they're only a step or two away from "why is there something instead of nothing, and also what is something?" and... good lord, at that point seriously just go become religious or get really into philosophy or something, because you're outta luck, kid, sorry, we don't have any actual answers, just observations about what all this stuff does, but no we can't tell you what "stuff" or "does" are.
- simiones 8y agoNoam Chomsky usually has this point, that the human mind seems limited in its "native understanding" to a mechanistic view of the world - that is the only kind of model that is truly satisfactory to us. He also points out that, ever since Newton, the dream of mechanistic world was shattered, and with it, any hope that science would help us "make sense of the world" in a truly satisfying sense. Instead, we have become content with modelling the world mathematically and predicting how it will evolve. Of course, space-time and quantum mechanics have driven additional nails in the coffin of a truly understandable world.
- AgentME 8y ago>Of course, space-time and quantum mechanics have driven additional nails in the coffin of a truly understandable world. I'd think the opposite. The fact the world can work at least as strangely as relativity and quantum mechanics suggest, and we still figured those out as much as we have so far, reassures me in our ability to figure out the world we exist in.
- simiones 8y agoWhat I meant was: quantum mechanics and relativity have shown that not only is the physical world slightly different from the kind of world our mind can picture (e.g. "mechanistic, but with the universal attraction force"), it is in fact nowhere near our built-in mechanistic model, and we can never hope to build a real intuition about the world. However, we can still hope to model and predict it more accurately than we would have ever hoped before, so there is that :)
- pasabagi 8y agoIt's also frightening how quickly a philosophy professor can get stymied by a really confident or particularly stupid undergrad. I don't think science or philosophy should claim to answer all questions. Many questions are ambiguous, badly formed, misleading, nonsensical, and I don't think a robust account of knowledge is one that ends with a stack of turtles.
- pixl97 8y agoScience cannot answer all of our questions, but it can teach us how to ask better ones.