7 ms·

Huh? A physical law is defined as a "... [conclusion] based on repeated scientific experiments and observations over many years and which have become accepted u

by syncerr 13y ago

Huh? A physical law is defined as a "... [conclusion] based on repeated scientific experiments and observations over many years and which have become accepted universally within the scientific community."[1] In other words -- something that has been shown not to vary. Faith by definition a "belief that is not based on proof".[2] So you're arguing against the validity of formal logic or the scientific method or that a reached consensus cannot be trusted? EDIT: I think you're overestimating the certainty that an empiricist would have about future events. ___ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_law [2] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faith http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faith

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pfortuny 13y ago
Not that it cannot be trusted but that believing it is a matter of faith. This does not mean it is less human to believe, but that it is patently human to have to believe something. Do not confuse formal logic (which deals with sintax, not meaning, so it has no truth in itself) and the scientific method for which belief is utterly necessary. Trust is not a bad thing. But trust requires faith. Faith is not a bad thing. "Consensus" is not an absolute source of unerring knowledge of reality.
- syncerr 13y ago
  I wasn't trying to imply that an empiricist would assert anything to be wholly true. Again from the same wiki article: Empiricism, often used by natural scientists, asserts that “knowledge is based on experience” and that “knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification.”
  - rz2k 13y ago
    I don't think that is what people are getting at. The precision and accuracy of an empiricist's observations can be off without violating ones faith in empiricism. However, the notion that something can happen, or that the past doesn't change, or that there are causes and effects are necessary assumptions of empiricism. Though assuming that causality is a thing seems to have worked out pretty well, you can also at least conceive a Looking Glass universe where the rules don't work the same and cause and effect are turned on their head.
- weland 13y ago
  This is a well-known debate which, IMO, stems from people making word mean what they want them to mean, at various moments, so that they can put up an argument. Empiricist thought means that I do not have faith in, say, Ohm's law. I have simply observed it to be true sufficiently often that I have been able to formulate a set of rules based on which I can tell when it holds and when it doesn't, and that, if I have doubts at any time, I can test it. I carry on my everyday activity being convinced that it is true as a consequence of having observed it. In a sense, yes, I can figuratively say that "I have faith in classical electromagnetism", but not because I think classical electromagnetism is infailible, but because I have observed it making good predictions. I don't have faith that it will work, I have a) proof that it worked before and b) proof that the things now are just like they were before, when it worked. If I stumble upon a case when it doesn't, I will first check my understanding of classical electromagnetism and, after making sure it's correct, I'll try to see why the prediction was incorrect and review my options about the cause of the phenomenon I am observing. Contrast this with my faith in Othin: I haven't observed him anywhere, I'm yet to see a giant and I can't really test whether he exists or not. I carry on my everyday activity being convinced that he exists, but only as a consequence of my faith. If this religious system makes a wrong prediction, I will typically review my understanding of it, but no my doubts. No giants around? Yeah, 'cause Thor HAMMERED THEM ALL!!! YEAH! No one has seen Othin in a thousand years? Well he likes to wander as a stranger, maybe they didn't know it was him. Both mechanisms can fail, of course, but I think their possible failures stem from different origins and through vastly different mechanisms.
  - comice 13y ago
    starts to get complicated when you start questioning what "observed" means. Can we observe a gene? We didn't used to be able to, now we can. Was it faith before we could observe it? Can we observe an electron? Or quantum particles? What about studying distance stars, or investigating past events? And where do empiricist get to the point of deciding that observing the world is something they can rely on? I don't genuinely hold any of these sceptical world views (nobody really does, do they) - these are mostly hard to answer/explain questions I keep getting thrown at me when I end up talking to serious creationists.
- leobelle 13y ago
  Here come the faith bearing apologists who take believing what you see as faith, and then somehow twist that into making it ok to believe things you cannot see. Because it's all faith. When someone does this, you've encountered someone with a broken brain. Someone incapable of critical thought and meaningful dialog. Faith is not ok. Faith is a really bad way to come to conclusions. Faith is a measure of last resort. If people who believe in the supernatural had anything other than faith to cling to to validate their beliefs they would jump on it. Instead all they have is faith. All hundreds of thousands of belief systems out there with completely contradictory beliefs using the same flawed faith mechanism to live their life. You talk to Christian apologists, as an example, for any amount of time you get all kinds of nonsensical rubbish that sounds like they're validating their beliefs on eye-witness testimony from people long dead, to validate a belief that heaps and mountains of empirical evidence you yourself can verify contradict. It's like you wouldn't believe a living, breathing witness in court if their testimony contradicted a DNA result, a single piece of evidence. Yet happy feeling supernatural mumble jumbled about being able to come back from the dead because some people thousands of years ago said they saw someone come back from the dead is ok? No, that's them relying on faith. Faith is bad. You don't use it to fix real world problems. And no heuristics are not the same as faith, so don't go there. Anyway, these people will use their keyboards and talk here about all kinds of things, but you know, press them and their mental gymnastics will fall like a house of cards, exposing their flawed mental states. Empiricism doesn't require faith, and faith is a bad thing. Avoid faith whenever possible. Use a heuristic, and verify when you have the time, make sure it's sound.
  - pfortuny 13y ago
    Oh, wait, you are inducing quite a few things about me. And the word "heuristics" is as meaningless to real knowldge as "pincarpion", by the way. Mhhhh.
    - leobelle 13y ago
      > And the word "heuristics" is as meaningless to real knowldge as "pincarpion", by the way. And there you have it. pfortuny has declared"heuristics" in quotes and meaningless. Let's all black out that word with a felt tip marker in our dictionary. If you didn't have enough reasons to already not find pfortuny as credible, well now you have another.
baddox 13y ago
You're still left with the problem of induction, which is a very real philosophical problem in science (and epistemology).
- syncerr 13y ago
  Yes, when trying to stand by a conclusion. I'd say that empiricism takes the easy path of simply washing their hands of any hard truths. It doesn't make them wrong, it just makes them smallest possible subset of all truths (empty).
  - Drakim 13y ago
    But are there any realistic alternatives?
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  Depends if you take absolute or probablistic logic to be the more fundamental. Absolute logic has held sway for a very long time, because it is obvious that either something is there, or it is not. Since the birth of quantum mechanics however, it is looking as though probability might be a little more fundamental to reality itself than we had previously assumed. Look at the classic "Cogito ergo sum". With an absolute perspective on logic, you cannot get much further, however if looked at probalistically, you can start looking at options and start assigning them weights. Now this doesn't get you any closer to the concept of what is absolutely true beyond the initial statement, however I am not sure that it is a given that reality itself is absolute for all parameters, so the trap might be that many of what we percieve as flaws in induction are actually meaningless questions until they are reformulated probabalistically. Alternatively I might be talking bollocks, I did first think of this while pretty drunk.
  - andrewflnr 13y ago
    The probabilities in QM are determined by absolute, deterministic equations. I'd still say absolute logic is fundamental, at least in physics. When you start talking metaphysics, I don't think there's a good reason to assume logic works at all; all the logic we can observe is embedded "in" physics. Who knows what it's like "outside"?
sdegutis 13y ago
> something that has been shown not to vary That does not mean they never will vary. They may vary at some point in the future. Although evidence strongly suggests it never will, that's not sufficient proof that it never will.

by syncerr 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pfortuny 13y ago

Not that it cannot be trusted but that believing it is a matter of faith. This does not mean it is less human to believe, but that it is patently human to have to believe something. Do not confuse formal logic (which deals with sintax, not meaning, so it has no truth in itself) and the scientific method for which belief is utterly necessary. Trust is not a bad thing. But trust requires faith. Faith is not a bad thing. "Consensus" is not an absolute source of unerring knowledge of reality.

syncerr 13y ago
I wasn't trying to imply that an empiricist would assert anything to be wholly true. Again from the same wiki article: Empiricism, often used by natural scientists, asserts that “knowledge is based on experience” and that “knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification.”
- rz2k 13y ago
  I don't think that is what people are getting at. The precision and accuracy of an empiricist's observations can be off without violating ones faith in empiricism. However, the notion that something can happen, or that the past doesn't change, or that there are causes and effects are necessary assumptions of empiricism. Though assuming that causality is a thing seems to have worked out pretty well, you can also at least conceive a Looking Glass universe where the rules don't work the same and cause and effect are turned on their head.
weland 13y ago
This is a well-known debate which, IMO, stems from people making word mean what they want them to mean, at various moments, so that they can put up an argument. Empiricist thought means that I do not have faith in, say, Ohm's law. I have simply observed it to be true sufficiently often that I have been able to formulate a set of rules based on which I can tell when it holds and when it doesn't, and that, if I have doubts at any time, I can test it. I carry on my everyday activity being convinced that it is true as a consequence of having observed it. In a sense, yes, I can figuratively say that "I have faith in classical electromagnetism", but not because I think classical electromagnetism is infailible, but because I have observed it making good predictions. I don't have faith that it will work, I have a) proof that it worked before and b) proof that the things now are just like they were before, when it worked. If I stumble upon a case when it doesn't, I will first check my understanding of classical electromagnetism and, after making sure it's correct, I'll try to see why the prediction was incorrect and review my options about the cause of the phenomenon I am observing. Contrast this with my faith in Othin: I haven't observed him anywhere, I'm yet to see a giant and I can't really test whether he exists or not. I carry on my everyday activity being convinced that he exists, but only as a consequence of my faith. If this religious system makes a wrong prediction, I will typically review my understanding of it, but no my doubts. No giants around? Yeah, 'cause Thor HAMMERED THEM ALL!!! YEAH! No one has seen Othin in a thousand years? Well he likes to wander as a stranger, maybe they didn't know it was him. Both mechanisms can fail, of course, but I think their possible failures stem from different origins and through vastly different mechanisms.
- comice 13y ago
  starts to get complicated when you start questioning what "observed" means. Can we observe a gene? We didn't used to be able to, now we can. Was it faith before we could observe it? Can we observe an electron? Or quantum particles? What about studying distance stars, or investigating past events? And where do empiricist get to the point of deciding that observing the world is something they can rely on? I don't genuinely hold any of these sceptical world views (nobody really does, do they) - these are mostly hard to answer/explain questions I keep getting thrown at me when I end up talking to serious creationists.
leobelle 13y ago
Here come the faith bearing apologists who take believing what you see as faith, and then somehow twist that into making it ok to believe things you cannot see. Because it's all faith. When someone does this, you've encountered someone with a broken brain. Someone incapable of critical thought and meaningful dialog. Faith is not ok. Faith is a really bad way to come to conclusions. Faith is a measure of last resort. If people who believe in the supernatural had anything other than faith to cling to to validate their beliefs they would jump on it. Instead all they have is faith. All hundreds of thousands of belief systems out there with completely contradictory beliefs using the same flawed faith mechanism to live their life. You talk to Christian apologists, as an example, for any amount of time you get all kinds of nonsensical rubbish that sounds like they're validating their beliefs on eye-witness testimony from people long dead, to validate a belief that heaps and mountains of empirical evidence you yourself can verify contradict. It's like you wouldn't believe a living, breathing witness in court if their testimony contradicted a DNA result, a single piece of evidence. Yet happy feeling supernatural mumble jumbled about being able to come back from the dead because some people thousands of years ago said they saw someone come back from the dead is ok? No, that's them relying on faith. Faith is bad. You don't use it to fix real world problems. And no heuristics are not the same as faith, so don't go there. Anyway, these people will use their keyboards and talk here about all kinds of things, but you know, press them and their mental gymnastics will fall like a house of cards, exposing their flawed mental states. Empiricism doesn't require faith, and faith is a bad thing. Avoid faith whenever possible. Use a heuristic, and verify when you have the time, make sure it's sound.
- pfortuny 13y ago
  Oh, wait, you are inducing quite a few things about me. And the word "heuristics" is as meaningless to real knowldge as "pincarpion", by the way. Mhhhh.
  - leobelle 13y ago
    > And the word "heuristics" is as meaningless to real knowldge as "pincarpion", by the way. And there you have it. pfortuny has declared"heuristics" in quotes and meaningless. Let's all black out that word with a felt tip marker in our dictionary. If you didn't have enough reasons to already not find pfortuny as credible, well now you have another.

baddox 13y ago

You're still left with the problem of induction, which is a very real philosophical problem in science (and epistemology).

syncerr 13y ago
Yes, when trying to stand by a conclusion. I'd say that empiricism takes the easy path of simply washing their hands of any hard truths. It doesn't make them wrong, it just makes them smallest possible subset of all truths (empty).
- Drakim 13y ago
  But are there any realistic alternatives?
moocowduckquack 13y ago
Depends if you take absolute or probablistic logic to be the more fundamental. Absolute logic has held sway for a very long time, because it is obvious that either something is there, or it is not. Since the birth of quantum mechanics however, it is looking as though probability might be a little more fundamental to reality itself than we had previously assumed. Look at the classic "Cogito ergo sum". With an absolute perspective on logic, you cannot get much further, however if looked at probalistically, you can start looking at options and start assigning them weights. Now this doesn't get you any closer to the concept of what is absolutely true beyond the initial statement, however I am not sure that it is a given that reality itself is absolute for all parameters, so the trap might be that many of what we percieve as flaws in induction are actually meaningless questions until they are reformulated probabalistically. Alternatively I might be talking bollocks, I did first think of this while pretty drunk.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  The probabilities in QM are determined by absolute, deterministic equations. I'd still say absolute logic is fundamental, at least in physics. When you start talking metaphysics, I don't think there's a good reason to assume logic works at all; all the logic we can observe is embedded "in" physics. Who knows what it's like "outside"?

sdegutis 13y ago

> something that has been shown not to vary That does not mean they never will vary. They may vary at some point in the future. Although evidence strongly suggests it never will, that's not sufficient proof that it never will.