3 ms·
Must have been nice back when science was just making up fun stories like the one linked.
by lnanek2 12y ago
Must have been nice back when science was just making up fun stories like the one linked.
- foxhill 12y agoscience has always about taking random guesses (some less random than others) and using evidence to determine wether those guesses are true. perhaps this makes no falsifiable claims. maybe it does, but we have no means to test them. sound familiar? string theory.
- mantrax5 12y agoScience is making up stories and seeing how they check out with reality. If they check out, we use the stories to extrapolate reality, i.e. build models that predict where reality will go based on our stories. There are three things to keep in mind: 1) There are infinite stories that may be equally good at describing the same reality. It's best to pick the simplest one that has a set of benefits we need, because why make our life hard, right? 2) If we can't measure how a story matches reality, the story is useless. Say, how on Earth would we measure if people had voices in their minds 3000 years ago? We can't. Therefore the story can't be verified. 3) One should be very careful not to confuse the stories with the reality it models. A story is a story. A model is a model. A math formula is a math formula. Reality is neither a story, a model, or a math formula. So when it comes to explaining the true nature of things, such as what the heck conscience is, and how it comes to be, science comes short. Because it always has been, and it always will be, just making up stories. But that doesn't make science any less useful, of course.