3 ms·

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

• weland 13y ago
  > Can we observe a gene? This implies that unless you can physically see it, then it's not observation. Trivial examples, such as the fact that you can tell that a door was open in a room because it's far colder than it should be and the door was the only way for cold air to get in, show that this is not generally as complicated. This is pretty much what happened with classical electromagnetism, too. I didn't pick up the example with Ohm's law just because I like it: it actually predates the discovery of the atom's structure. It made valid predictions about how things happen, based on observing only effects, not the underlying structures. They actually got much of the underlying structure wrong, but the predictions based on nothing but observed phenomenons rather than wishful thinking about ether turned out to be correct, even though their mechanism was explained about a century later. > Can we observe an electron? Or quantum particles? Actually, yes for both, we pretty much photograph them to know they exist. > And where do empiricist get to the point of deciding that observing the world is something they can rely on? They don't; or, rather, if any of them claims they do, they're full of shit IMO. For all we know, the world could indeed be an intricate illusion, in which case we're only deciphering the strange mechanism of our illusion. > 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. Yeah, I know the feeling. I've been asking myself all these questions, too, and many more, for years, since I began to seriously study philosophy. The abyss stares back at me every day :-).