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I always enjoy people using computers and the internet to tell us how useless science is.
This is where you make an assumption, and where you could go back and challenge the assumption and learn new things. There is one true God, and thousands of attempts to put a face onto God, failed.But the proposition of dark matter, unlike gods, is actually well-motivated
Science isn't useless. It just doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the nature of reality. Those are two very different things.
I'd argue it tells us plenty about the nature of reality. In fact, virtually everything we can demonstrate to be true about the nature of reality we discovered through science.
I'd argue it tells us plenty about the nature of reality. In fact, virtually everything we can demonstrate to be true about the nature of reality we discovered through science.
Not really. Science deals with predictable patterns rather than "objective" external reality--it's unlikely that our minds are just imposing order where it doesn't really exist, but we can't really demonstrate otherwise. It's an underlying assumption of science that reality is intelligible, but that assumption could ultimately turn out to be false. Or rationality could be an illusion. Goodbye, science.
There are reasons to think that science is actually providing us with genuine knowledge about reality, true, but that's an argument for the philosophy of science, not something you can demonstrate with science itself. So if someone is going to reject philosophical inquiry as meaningful, they can't say anything about scientific knowledge either. Which is fine, I suppose, as long as they're consistent about it.
If by "reality" we mean the way things appear to work (which to me is a pretty lax, but common, definition), then science can say something about reality. But if we're talking about how things are independent of how we perceive them, then the problem of hard solipsism shows we can't be sure that what science tells us has anything to do with reality.
Not really. Science deals with predictable patterns rather than "objective" external reality--it's unlikely that our minds are just imposing order where it doesn't really exist, but we can't really demonstrate otherwise. It's an underlying assumption of science that reality is intelligible, but that assumption could ultimately turn out to be false. Or rationality could be an illusion. Goodbye, science.
There are reasons to think that science is actually providing us with genuine knowledge about reality, true, but that's an argument for the philosophy of science, not something you can demonstrate with science itself. So if someone is going to reject philosophical inquiry as meaningful, they can't say anything about scientific knowledge either. Which is fine, I suppose, as long as they're consistent about it.
In addition to accounting for what's already observed, theories in physics can make unanticipated new predictions about potential observables never before seen nor expected.
Example: General Relativity predicted an not yet known (no observations showing it yet) bending of star light (around the sun), and seeking to test this new prediction, astronomers observed an eclipse and found the predicted deflection of star light (first observation for this ever) precisely as General Relativity predicted.
Spectacular and dramatic.
So, while we can still consider what is "reality", etc., that same reality in physics seems.... already existing.
Already real, before we ever discover.
I have a phrase i use for this: "reality is hard"(instead of soft or illusory).
It exists independently of us.
The problem is, science has a long history of producing results.
My previous reply deals with the rest of your post as well.
That physics seems to provide a consistent model of reality for us doesn't really shed too much light on the question of how well this model matches up to the real thing.
We thought we had physics figured out 100 years ago, and we were completely wrong.
Put in different words, physics laws like conservation of momentum, etc., and physics entities like electrons and photons, etc. are as real as water or air or human beings. Equally.
Well... I don't entirely believe in matter, so that doesn't mean much to me.
I'm not an absolute idealist, but if I were one, physics really couldn't demonstrate that literally every aspect of the world we see around us wasn't merely an idea of the mind of God with no intrinsic reality, à la Berkeley. But you don't really even need to take things to that extreme to end up with a picture whereby the scientific image of the universe is obscuring more than it reveals about reality.
We thought we had physics figured out 100 years ago, and we were completely wrong.
Newton is correct in terms of cannon balls and space craft moving around the Earth.
It has a long history of invalidating the previously held scientific worldview. Ptolomaic astronomy, classical mechanics. It would be arrogance to claim that we've now finally crossed a threshold and science actually affords us an accurate picture of reality. We can't know.
My post had nothing to do with solipsism, but the fact that solipsism is unfalsifiable doesn't really mean anything. Unfalsifiability is just the conventional delineator between what does and doesn't count as scientific knowledge. It has nothing to do with whether or not something is worth taking seriously.
I see, so a self correcting system which steadily improves over time as more knowledge is gained is somehow bad for you.
If something is unfalsifiable, it has no practical value to us
I see, so a self correcting system which steadily improves over time as more knowledge is gained is somehow bad for you.
If something is unfalsifiable, it has no practical value to us
Indeed, if something is unfalsifiable I think is one is justified in hard denial (or a declaration of non-existence) without having to prove anything.
When did I say that science is bad? My point was that we can never know to what extent the picture of reality it paints is actually true, due to its both limitations and the unproven assumptions underlying the entire system. The more abstract the field, the more potentially problematic it is.
Congratulations, you just dismissed all the arts and humanities, including the very philosophy of science that makes science intelligible at all.
Naturalism is unfalsifiable.
And yet, it still works and produces tangible results. Weird.
Likewise, no it isn't. Naturalism is the only justifiable position we can follow at the moment. It posits that laws and forces of nature govern the structure or behaviour of the universe. We can confirm that through repeated testing. Gravity, electromangetism, etc. It all works.
Yes, naturalism is unfalsifiable, by definition. Science relies upon methodological naturalism, so it cannot test whether or not anything falls outside of those boundaries. We can expand the limits of what is considered naturalism--the definition of "materialism" has certainly evolved over time--but as soon as you drop methodological naturalism, you have dropped the scientific method.
If you do not feel comfortable with alternatives to naturalism, you certainly are not obligated to accept any of them. You do not get to tell anyone else that an unfalsifiable model of reality is the only justifiable position to hold, however. You're arbitrarily making up your own rules about how the universe is to be approached and then insisting that other people follow them. The word for that is "dogma."
The initial topic here was mathematical platonism, which apparently became controversial amongst atheists while I wasn't looking. I wish people would actually use falsifiability in the way Karl Popper intended rather than as a weapon to go after any doctrine but their own.
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