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Because statements about how things are always boil back to a faith-based statement at some point. Eg, all the evidence we see is completely consistent with an

by roenxi 3y ago

Because statements about how things are always boil back to a faith-based statement at some point. Eg, all the evidence we see is completely consistent with an infinitely creative human-shaped god sitting in a 2m-by-2m universe who has turned themselves into a brain-in-a-jar and purposefully limited their consciousness to entertain themselves. With that interpretation "we" are not only the most important thing in the universe but also could reasonably argue that in reality we occupy a significant fraction of it. Now I personally agree with the Occam's razor view that what we see is what we get, but every interpretation has to admit there are gaping holes at the foundation of any belief where the answer is "we don't know, we're just making assumptions that seem obviously true". Just because something is held to be most consistent with the currently available evidence isn't really enough to claim it is true, because it isn't obviously true to me that our evidence-gathering is uncovering important aspects about the nature of the universe. We're just doing our best - that might not be good enough. Evolution certainly isn't optimised to work out the truth, otherwise intelligence would be more usual instead of crab-shaped things.

TimTheTinker 3y ago
Right, any system of belief (yours included) boils down to axioms that have to be either accepted or rejected without evidence. I've thought many times in the past that we'd all do best if we could choose our system of belief based on how well seeing "through" it makes sense of things. But too often that sense of "how well" is subjective and so prone to being misguided based on things as small as what we had for breakfast. And it's exceedingly hard to see through the eyes of a true believer in another "faith" in the first place. Even so, a deep-seated personal commitment to discover and submit oneself to truth in good faith, no matter where honest inquiry leads, can go a very long way.
haskman 3y ago
What's true is determined by the scientific method. You can make as many theories as you want but if you can't make predictions based on that theory and devise experiments to verify those predictions, and perhaps most importantly, be open to abandoning your theory when even a single one of those experiments doesn't pan out, all you have done is shot an arrow in the dark and claimed it could have hit the target. Yes, but that information is nearly useless, and definitely can't be put on the same pedestal as someone providing actual evidence that the arrow missed the target.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > What's true is determined by the scientific method. Not quite. This is how what is said to be True is determined...within some subset of the (culturally dominant) population, at this particular era in our semi-self-aware species' ongoing development. Science practices watered down epistemology even in the lab, and the further you get away from the lab and toward public discussions, it gets watered down even further. And by the time it gets to the point of public discussion (science's fan base), epistemology is pretty much gone from consideration, it's regurgitation of memorization, if not worse (LLM level hallucination). > You can make as many theories as you want but if you can't make predictions based on that theory and devise experiments to verify those predictions... So far so good.... > ...and perhaps most importantly, be open to abandoning your theory when even a single one of those experiments doesn't pan out... Ah crap. Crash and burn. > all you have done is shot an arrow in the dark and claimed it could have hit the target. This isn't true, and there's also no way for you to know these things (what individual scientists are doing, saying, thinking). > Yes, but that information is nearly useless... There's no way for you to know this. > ...and definitely can't be put on the same pedestal as someone providing actual evidence that the arrow missed the target. Yes it can. You can literally say and do pretty much whatever you want in this simulation. There are almost no constraints whatsoever, other than sheer lack of imagination (which is an extremely big problem imho)....I mean, just take your comments, and the vast majority of other comments in this thread. There's (almost) no need for anything anyone says to be true....in fact, even venturing a little outside of the Overton Window (to the positive side, on certain topics) of acceptable levels of epistemology here will certainly get you downvoted, if not warned by moderators. We have a culture here, and cultures have beliefs, and those beliefs are to be respected, regardless of the actual truth of the matter. The truth of the matter, very often (on certain topics), is off limits for discussion. And even more interestingly: it seems like all social media platforms have somehow adopted the same set of rules for That Which Cannot Be Discussed. I often wonder if this is sheer coincidence.
- roenxi 3y ago
  There are a few issues with that position: 1) "What's true is determined by the scientific method" is, in fact, an axiom based on the old "obviously true" assumption. 2) There is thus far no evidence that the scientific method can deduce what the universe is and why it came into being. So according to the scientific method, we should probably be concluding that the truth isn't determined by the scientific method. It is a window into a fairly small subset of the truth. 3) We don't use the scientific method in court cases, we use standards of evidence and reasonableness tests. So when it matters what the truth is we don't use science (and, indeed, probably could not because it is too limited to achieve fairness).
scubbo 3y ago
Hmm - fair enough. By this (valid!) argument, _any_ statement about the world is misinformative, because there's always an implicit caveat of "...if my perceptions of the world are accurate reflections of its state, and if I'm correct in believing that other people (who report their perceptions of the world to me) are in fact other people and not just hallucinations". I personally think it's fair to take that assumption as baseline in any discussion not specifically about epistemology, since, without it, any discussion will founder (and, _if_ that assumption is taken as an axiom, I still maintain that it's not misinformation to make the ~~true~~ overwhelmingly-supported-by-my-perceptions-and-my-perceptions-of-other-people's-perceptions statement that "human history is vanishingly-short on a universal scale") - but you are certainly technically correct.
- roenxi 3y ago
  It is a bit more than a technicality. If we start from the position that our perceptions are accurate something interesting happens. 1) If we start by assuming our perceptions are accurate; we can reasonably conclude that we are a product of evolutionary forces. 2) Those evolutionary forces mean our perceptions are subject to the anthropic principle - ie, heavily biased away from truth and towards things that cause conscious patterns to reoccur and reproduce. 3) Therefore there is strong reason to believe our perceptions aren't accurate reflections of the state of the world, because if we are in a universe where accurate perception of reality means we won't bother to reproduce or wouldn't see ourselves as conscious, we are likely be unable to perceive those aspects of it. So I'm quite happy to contend that our perceptions are probably critically flawed, because they are heavily biased towards making us believe things about ego, self, in- and out-groups, etc that are probably inconsistent with accurately perceiving reality. Under that lens, perceiving time itself jumps out as something that might be an evolutionary adaption rather than the true state of things. Those baseline assumptions that allow the conversation to happen are therefore probably wrong. Although, humorously, that does mean there isn't much point discussing the topic unless you just like playing around with nonsense. Long and the short of it; we can't escape what is "obviously true" to us. Although I don't think you were challenging that part of the conversation.
  - 3y ago

by roenxi 3y ago

TimTheTinker 3y ago

Right, any system of belief (yours included) boils down to axioms that have to be either accepted or rejected without evidence. I've thought many times in the past that we'd all do best if we could choose our system of belief based on how well seeing "through" it makes sense of things. But too often that sense of "how well" is subjective and so prone to being misguided based on things as small as what we had for breakfast. And it's exceedingly hard to see through the eyes of a true believer in another "faith" in the first place. Even so, a deep-seated personal commitment to discover and submit oneself to truth in good faith, no matter where honest inquiry leads, can go a very long way.

haskman 3y ago

What's true is determined by the scientific method. You can make as many theories as you want but if you can't make predictions based on that theory and devise experiments to verify those predictions, and perhaps most importantly, be open to abandoning your theory when even a single one of those experiments doesn't pan out, all you have done is shot an arrow in the dark and claimed it could have hit the target. Yes, but that information is nearly useless, and definitely can't be put on the same pedestal as someone providing actual evidence that the arrow missed the target.

mistermann 3y ago
> What's true is determined by the scientific method. Not quite. This is how what is said to be True is determined...within some subset of the (culturally dominant) population, at this particular era in our semi-self-aware species' ongoing development. Science practices watered down epistemology even in the lab, and the further you get away from the lab and toward public discussions, it gets watered down even further. And by the time it gets to the point of public discussion (science's fan base), epistemology is pretty much gone from consideration, it's regurgitation of memorization, if not worse (LLM level hallucination). > You can make as many theories as you want but if you can't make predictions based on that theory and devise experiments to verify those predictions... So far so good.... > ...and perhaps most importantly, be open to abandoning your theory when even a single one of those experiments doesn't pan out... Ah crap. Crash and burn. > all you have done is shot an arrow in the dark and claimed it could have hit the target. This isn't true, and there's also no way for you to know these things (what individual scientists are doing, saying, thinking). > Yes, but that information is nearly useless... There's no way for you to know this. > ...and definitely can't be put on the same pedestal as someone providing actual evidence that the arrow missed the target. Yes it can. You can literally say and do pretty much whatever you want in this simulation. There are almost no constraints whatsoever, other than sheer lack of imagination (which is an extremely big problem imho)....I mean, just take your comments, and the vast majority of other comments in this thread. There's (almost) no need for anything anyone says to be true....in fact, even venturing a little outside of the Overton Window (to the positive side, on certain topics) of acceptable levels of epistemology here will certainly get you downvoted, if not warned by moderators. We have a culture here, and cultures have beliefs, and those beliefs are to be respected, regardless of the actual truth of the matter. The truth of the matter, very often (on certain topics), is off limits for discussion. And even more interestingly: it seems like all social media platforms have somehow adopted the same set of rules for That Which Cannot Be Discussed. I often wonder if this is sheer coincidence.
roenxi 3y ago
There are a few issues with that position: 1) "What's true is determined by the scientific method" is, in fact, an axiom based on the old "obviously true" assumption. 2) There is thus far no evidence that the scientific method can deduce what the universe is and why it came into being. So according to the scientific method, we should probably be concluding that the truth isn't determined by the scientific method. It is a window into a fairly small subset of the truth. 3) We don't use the scientific method in court cases, we use standards of evidence and reasonableness tests. So when it matters what the truth is we don't use science (and, indeed, probably could not because it is too limited to achieve fairness).

scubbo 3y ago

Hmm - fair enough. By this (valid!) argument, _any_ statement about the world is misinformative, because there's always an implicit caveat of "...if my perceptions of the world are accurate reflections of its state, and if I'm correct in believing that other people (who report their perceptions of the world to me) are in fact other people and not just hallucinations". I personally think it's fair to take that assumption as baseline in any discussion not specifically about epistemology, since, without it, any discussion will founder (and, _if_ that assumption is taken as an axiom, I still maintain that it's not misinformation to make the ~~true~~ overwhelmingly-supported-by-my-perceptions-and-my-perceptions-of-other-people's-perceptions statement that "human history is vanishingly-short on a universal scale") - but you are certainly technically correct.

roenxi 3y ago
It is a bit more than a technicality. If we start from the position that our perceptions are accurate something interesting happens. 1) If we start by assuming our perceptions are accurate; we can reasonably conclude that we are a product of evolutionary forces. 2) Those evolutionary forces mean our perceptions are subject to the anthropic principle - ie, heavily biased away from truth and towards things that cause conscious patterns to reoccur and reproduce. 3) Therefore there is strong reason to believe our perceptions aren't accurate reflections of the state of the world, because if we are in a universe where accurate perception of reality means we won't bother to reproduce or wouldn't see ourselves as conscious, we are likely be unable to perceive those aspects of it. So I'm quite happy to contend that our perceptions are probably critically flawed, because they are heavily biased towards making us believe things about ego, self, in- and out-groups, etc that are probably inconsistent with accurately perceiving reality. Under that lens, perceiving time itself jumps out as something that might be an evolutionary adaption rather than the true state of things. Those baseline assumptions that allow the conversation to happen are therefore probably wrong. Although, humorously, that does mean there isn't much point discussing the topic unless you just like playing around with nonsense. Long and the short of it; we can't escape what is "obviously true" to us. Although I don't think you were challenging that part of the conversation.
- 3y ago