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This isn't about laziness or the difficulty in understanding anything. There is a fundamental limitation of perception and cognition. Science can only describ

by ta8645 6y ago

This isn't about laziness or the difficulty in understanding anything. There is a fundamental limitation of perception and cognition. Science can only describe what it sees. But it never knows if there is something important yet undiscovered that will change the analysis, because you just can't know what you don't know. The universe is always capable of surprise. We are trapped forever with a limitation in what kind of pronouncements we can make about truth. The best we could ever say, is that something appears to be true today. For instance, there is a chance that we are actually in a simulation -- that we're literally just a running computer program. If that is the case, the programmers of that simulation could change the instructions that control our physics at any moment. And everything that you have declared "true" will have to be reevaluated. This might seem unlikely, but it is not impossible, and so science has to keep an open mind and hedge its bets when making any declaration about reality. Science can only give you a probability that something is true, it can not ever say things with 100% confidence.

kaba0 6y ago
Occam’s razor. Science does have some “dependency” on the philosophy of sciences, and while pedantic, simulation is a possibility, but so is “the world popped into existence this morning in a state that we have a collective memory of an imaginary past, and with dinosaur bones in the ground etc”. But this requires much much more presupposition than the scientifically accepted position with the Big Bang et al. And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible, but not probable explanations we can make up.
- ta8645 6y ago
  > And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible That's fine. We have to be pragmatic and can't go around worried about ghosts. But the point is that we have to be honest about the nature of "truth". It is provisional and only our best effort given our relationship with the universe. And because we must admit that there is no such thing as 100% truth, we should be more humble than going around making pronouncements with such certainty as if we know more than we are actually even able to know.

by ta8645 6y ago

kaba0 6y ago

Occam’s razor. Science does have some “dependency” on the philosophy of sciences, and while pedantic, simulation is a possibility, but so is “the world popped into existence this morning in a state that we have a collective memory of an imaginary past, and with dinosaur bones in the ground etc”. But this requires much much more presupposition than the scientifically accepted position with the Big Bang et al. And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible, but not probable explanations we can make up.

ta8645 6y ago
> And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible That's fine. We have to be pragmatic and can't go around worried about ghosts. But the point is that we have to be honest about the nature of "truth". It is provisional and only our best effort given our relationship with the universe. And because we must admit that there is no such thing as 100% truth, we should be more humble than going around making pronouncements with such certainty as if we know more than we are actually even able to know.