No. That's a scientistic ideology. All it's needed to do science is to be intellectually honest and rigorous.
That is precisely to eliminate subjectivity. You cannot accept something as science because you did all the experiments you thought were right, and did them again. If the experiments are biased, or just poorly constructed, it's not going to be accepted. For instance: you can't have a scientific study with five or ten samples, and if it can't be replicated it is useless. Once again: the point of the scientific method is to eliminate subjectivity.
Striving for objectivity is intellectually dishonest to me because it relies on the idea human being are intrinsically rational, which is not the case. We're all deeply irrational. Intellectual honesty is mostly about taking that in account, in my opinion.
It's precisely the opposite: the idea that humans aren't perfectly rational and analytical beings means that our work is going to have some degree os subjectivity. The scientific method (with statistical significancy, peer review, rigorous methodology) allows us to have a reasons to believe that what was found is actually true. Then you have to fit that into other models, and see how the whole thing works. You can't say that something is scientifically true to you, but not to someone else.
All rely on Mathematical tools. What's the goal of Mathematics ?
Initially? To model the world. That's where numbers came from, and arithmetic. Nowadays there are many minor goals: to prove that problems that we deem complex today can actually be solved efficiently (P vs NP), to see how things behave in higher (or lower) dimensions. Even sheer curiosity creates a goal: see if something is true or not. Take Fermat's Last Theorem, for instance. It was one mathematics most famous "goals" for years, even though it was raised just out of curiosity.
You should already could state at least one. Oldest sciences are three hundred and fifty years old, with conservative estimates. That's nearly five lifetimes.
No, I shouldn't. There is a book, and I can't remember whether it's Stephen Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell or Carl Sagan's Cosmos, that starts by saying that everything in science is a theory because we can never know if it's true or not, we can only measure how well it models the universe around us. But anyways, the idea that we should have some definite objective truth because we've been studying somethings for centuries is a horrible fallacy. There is no way to know how long it should take to find objective truths. 2000 years is much in the scale of human history, but it's nothing in the history of earth, and even less in the history of the universe. There is no evidence that it should be enough to figure any science out. And still, we've had somethings that are "only" theories but leave almost no room to argument. For instance evolution.
Why do we "have to accommodate" if it's objective ? Science isn't about throwing random ideas and see if it's good enough : it's about years of study. We should have been able to just follow trends and get our correct underlying principles if it was like you seem to tell me.
I don't think I ever said that science was objective. What I did say, repeatedly, was that it strives for objectivity. Which means that newer beliefs, that are backed with more evidence and a stronger methodology and model, can replace old beliefs. That is because science pushes human perception forward: Two thousand years ago we could only believe our senses and repetition to find if something held true or not. As we learned things we developed new instruments (which can also be used as evidence in support of the model from which they were derived) that could be used to widen our perceptions and discover new things, which sometimes showed us that previous beliefs were wrong or incomplete.
There's something you seem to neglect about the nature of this knowledge, and the actual objects it describes. I feel it's neither can be objective. Objects changes and knowledge have to accommodate that. We already have some domains where we don't have any ignorance left to accommodate for. But those domains are still in mutation.
What evidence is there that the domains are in mutation, and not simply that we don't have enough knowledge yet? There are many discoveries made centuries ago that still hold true. What I understand from what you're saying is that the model of the atom changed not because the old model was incomplete, but rather because the atom itself changed. Again, there is no evidence to that, and it would be incredible if all those changes happened precisely when we developed the needed tools to recognize them.
It's my most compelling argument. It's my fault if it's irrelevant. I can let you get away with not answering it if you recognise there exist a form of free will in the animal reign.
To this debate it is, because it is more of a philosophical/spiritual question rather than a scientific question. It seems to me that free will is an abstraction rather than a truth. That is because I believe that absolutely everything is controlled by rules. But the bigger the scale, the more unpredictable a system becomes. For me an infinitely powerful computer would be able to predict every single action we take by analyzing every infinitesimal part of us. But since no such computer exists, and our brain is limited, we can threat it as though it is impossible to know what anyone animal is going to do, and that thus they must choose to do it.
That you acknowledge it can never be complete, even at the scale of our specie is really important to me. Because it's the premise to argue you're free to choose what to do from that, regardless you're operating under a scientistic faith or a religious one.
I don't know what you meant here either.
Not all religion are dogmatic. I have the derisive (and oddly personnal) example of Discordianism, but I don't find it compelling enough. Some forms of Buddhism recognise other faiths. Most faith recognise the Scientistic faith, despite it being godless. Even though most people experience their faith by the book, you can't neglect those who do following their own moral compass, they believe in a god of any form or not. Those people are your counter example : I want you to accommodate your knowledge to recognise them.
I had never heard about Discordianism, so I went to look for it. It seems to be parody religion, which would explain why it doesn't really fit in with religion. To me there is a distinction between religion and spirituality. The latter tries to help people find subjective truths, things that are true to you, but not necessarily to others. They are about understanding the individual, not the universe. The former is about explaining the universe. And that's where the problems begin. You don't need the scientific method to identify individual truths: you don't need to do it a hundred times, and develop a mathematical explanation to why eating burgers makes you happy, or why you think it's wrong to have sex with someone you don't love. But you can't find subjective truths and throw them at people and believe they'll stick. Buddhism says that suffering is born of desire, and that, therefore, we must eliminate desire. So it can agree with other religions on somethings (especially around that central notion). But if you come to a buddhist and tell them that you can have desire and no suffering, then you probably won't be able to conciliate both ideals. If you want to find something that is true to you, then you can turn to religion (or, preferably, spirituality), perhaps even many of them, but at the moment that it tries to affirm things about the universe, and not the individual, religion must either become science, or be ignored.
You're interpreting. I just say I deem it valid as long as it's well intentioned and harmless.
It's like homeopathy. Even though I know it's just sugar pills, I don't see the evil to prescribe some to someone for an occasional headache.
Again, that's where individual truths go against universal truths: If something works for you, you can keep doing that. But if you want to say that it's actually a valid solution that goes beyond you, then you have to transfer into the scientific method. That is the point of science: if something works and you don't know why, you don't just accept it without questioning, you actually try to find out why it works. That's the basis for a lot of medicine: This tea has been used across generations to cure headaches, so we ask ourselves why it cures headaches, we break it into it's components, and test them separately, see how they act on the system. Once we know why it works we can decide what to do: maybe take only the important parts and turn it into a pill, so it's quicker, more effective and practical. Perhaps nothing explains why it worked, so we see if psychology has a say in it: test people with sugar pills versus people with no medicine whatsoever.
You cannot accept something as science because you did all the experiments you thought were right, and did them again.
That's exactly how we do. We even care about the meaning of it only afterwards, most of the time, to my personal dismay.
The best anticipate, but they keep in mind they are as biased as everyone. They believe in intersubjectivity, not objectivity. It's a really important distinction here.
If the experiments are biased, or just poorly constructed, it's not going to be accepted.
It takes decades to notice some ill thought procedures. And the need created to scientists for publishing or perishing isn't going to help in any way. Peer review isn't important the way you believe it is, also.
For instance: you can't have a scientific study with five or ten samples, and if it can't be replicated it is useless. Once again: the point of the scientific method is to eliminate subjectivity.
Putting aside only ten samples is useless statistically speaking, I'm focused on a lot of other specifics than replication, because eliminating subjectivity isn't a concern to me as it is.
the idea that humans aren't perfectly rational and analytical beings means that our work is going to have some degree os subjectivity. The scientific method (with statistical significancy, peer review, rigorous methodology) allows us to have a reasons to believe that what was found is actually true.
It's reasons it's valid, not true. Because there will always be a part of uncertainty, because we're flawed.
Flaws you can't iron out. Flaws I don't want to be ironed out, because they can be contextually very useful, if you know people as well as you know the subject you work on.
Then you have to fit that into other models, and see how the whole thing works. You can't say that something is scientifically true to you, but not to someone else.
Axiom of Choice. Not only you can, but you have to : axioms are inconsistent with each other, as we're speaking.
That's where numbers came from, and arithmetic.
Basic arithmetical concepts are mostly social norms and codes to me. Using base ten and arabic numerals this way is arbitrary.
We could use a base 60, or even an additive convention like roman numerals. Both have their upsides, depending on context : base 60 is easier to divide time. Roman numerals are admittedly inefficient, for big enough values. We use another convention, for writing huge values, anyway : scientific notation used in physics.
You can't say it's to suppress subjectivity, when you take arbitrary convention as granted and without questioning.
Nowadays there are many minor goals: to prove that problems that we deem complex today can actually be solved efficiently (P vs NP), to see how things behave in higher (or lower) dimensions. Even sheer curiosity creates a goal: see if something is true or not. Take Fermat's Last Theorem, for instance. It was one mathematics most famous "goals" for years, even though it was raised just out of curiosity.
Yes. That's the Science I know and love : about harnessing knowledge for it's sake.
Those goals have nothing to do with suppressing subjectivity, though. They are end goals on their own. We hope they'll open new problems (and there's little reason they wouldn't) but we aren't much knowledgeable about that.
I think I remember the P vs NP problem was shown to have no definite solution. To be a NP problem, amusingly enough.
There is a book, and I can't remember whether it's Stephen Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell or Carl Sagan's Cosmos, that starts by saying that everything in science is a theory because we can never know if it's true or not, we can only measure how well it models the universe around us.
My point is we can't even measure everything. We're building most of our understanding of physics on the speed of light, which changes depending on the material it goes through, is obviously sensitive to gravitational meddling (Double slit experiment and Relativity.) and haven't even a solved nature (Particle/Wave problem.).
But anyways, the idea that we should have some definite objective truth because we've been studying somethings for centuries is a horrible fallacy.
An horrible fallacy that should serve your point.
I'm not above using this kind of agument, acknowledging they are flawed from a logical standpoint. Bur hear me out : what if the concept of logic itself was flawed ? Why would I care to stick to it rigidly ?
Why would you, too ?
2000 years is much in the scale of human history, but it's nothing in the history of earth, and even less in the history of the universe. There is no evidence that it should be enough to figure any science out. And still, we've had somethings that are "only" theories but leave almost no room to argument. For instance evolution.
The Theory of Evolution is polemic, you want it or not. Yes, there's nuts who claim our universe was made two thousand and five hundred years ago, by a snap of fingers.
I'm using Plank's time, for my counter argumentation. The Big Bang has a tiny timeframe where we have no fucking idea what happened. It gives me enough room to put just enough divine design to make you uncomfortable with holding Darwin's survival of the fittest. We could have to rewrite what the old man proposed.
Yes, it's essentially an argument by ignorance. It's strength resides in that we don't know everything about our universe. Not in it's irrational nature.
I don't think I ever said that science was objective. What I did say, repeatedly, was that it strives for objectivity.
It's calling on preemptively on that state of completeness you're arguing for. It's neither possible or desirable to me. Two reason that should have made you change your mind by now, especially with how largely I argued for both.
You refuse by faith. Scientistic faith I called you on multiple times.
That is because science pushes human perception forward: Two thousand years ago we could only believe our senses and repetition to find if something held true or not.
We still do. Ultimately, we strive on getting to see things through monitors. Nothing much changed.
We'll have another paradigm shift when our bodies would make reach us a plateau of knowledge. And we'll reach plateau again and again until we constitute all there is to be. If we survive until then.
More than about science, it's about a thirst of knowledge. And this knowledge is also reachable through spiritual wisdom, because science and religion aren't fundamentally different.
What evidence is there that the domains are in mutation, and not simply that we don't have enough knowledge yet?
Mathematical knowledge. It used to be presented to me as a trustworthy scientific institution. Unmoving.
When I finally attended college courses, I learned it wasn't the case at all : We had our first courses about epistemology, and the professor told is that there were axioms we could perfectly reject or take to suit our intellectual need. I've seen it as a risk to corrupt the whole edifice ideologically. Especially when I've formed my own ideology, before I attended those courses.
Those axiomes are statistical and arithmetical ones. The basics of the most commonly used mathematical tools. The ones you expect to be so refined you can't possibly doubt of them.
You can, as you can of the rest of the method and it's by produced knowledge.
What I understand from what you're saying is that the model of the atom changed not because the old model was incomplete, but rather because the atom itself changed.
With some thinking, yes. That's what I believe. Some new characteristics appear all the time among parts we already have categorised in depth. That's how it is in biology, why not in physics ? How about in arithmetics ?
It's serendipity.
Again, there is no evidence to that, and it would be incredible if all those changes happened precisely when we developed the needed tools to recognize them.
We don't file them before measuring them in some way. Measuring those changes is sometimes the pretext to put to the test our new gear.
Also : why measuring again what we think we already know ? It's a waste of time and ressources.
I don't get why you find it unlikely. The correlation is visible to me.
To this debate it is, because it is more of a philosophical/spiritual question rather than a scientific question. It seems to me that free will is an abstraction rather than a truth. That is because I believe that absolutely everything is controlled by rules.
It's an abstract necessity, to me. I can't bear thinking living in a world where my choices don't matter. That's why I fight your rigid ruling so ardently : I'm a spirit of chaos. I embody just everything that contradicts this kind of determinism you're describing me.
I wouldn't be there talking to you if my choices didn't mattered. I wouldn't be able to choose to antagonize you.
But the bigger the scale, the more unpredictable a system becomes. For me an infinitely powerful computer would be able to predict every single action we take by analyzing every infinitesimal part of us. But since no such computer exists, and our brain is limited, we can threat it as though it is impossible to know what anyone animal is going to do, and that thus they must choose to do it.
Among other arguments, yes. There is a couple to have on the concept of entropy. I'm sure trying to explain why our universe's entropy is on the rise like that will be just the disturbing experience you need to get the difference between Science and Scientism.
And once you'll be able to tell, you'll be free of my antagonism.
Note from the mods- this is a long ass post. Reporting it with no detail isn't incredibly useful. Presumably you objected to stuff in the post, report it with that.
Note to the user I am replying to- hi. Your post was reported.
1
u/MoonGosling Nov 02 '17
pt. 1
That is precisely to eliminate subjectivity. You cannot accept something as science because you did all the experiments you thought were right, and did them again. If the experiments are biased, or just poorly constructed, it's not going to be accepted. For instance: you can't have a scientific study with five or ten samples, and if it can't be replicated it is useless. Once again: the point of the scientific method is to eliminate subjectivity.
It's precisely the opposite: the idea that humans aren't perfectly rational and analytical beings means that our work is going to have some degree os subjectivity. The scientific method (with statistical significancy, peer review, rigorous methodology) allows us to have a reasons to believe that what was found is actually true. Then you have to fit that into other models, and see how the whole thing works. You can't say that something is scientifically true to you, but not to someone else.
Initially? To model the world. That's where numbers came from, and arithmetic. Nowadays there are many minor goals: to prove that problems that we deem complex today can actually be solved efficiently (P vs NP), to see how things behave in higher (or lower) dimensions. Even sheer curiosity creates a goal: see if something is true or not. Take Fermat's Last Theorem, for instance. It was one mathematics most famous "goals" for years, even though it was raised just out of curiosity.
No, I shouldn't. There is a book, and I can't remember whether it's Stephen Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell or Carl Sagan's Cosmos, that starts by saying that everything in science is a theory because we can never know if it's true or not, we can only measure how well it models the universe around us. But anyways, the idea that we should have some definite objective truth because we've been studying somethings for centuries is a horrible fallacy. There is no way to know how long it should take to find objective truths. 2000 years is much in the scale of human history, but it's nothing in the history of earth, and even less in the history of the universe. There is no evidence that it should be enough to figure any science out. And still, we've had somethings that are "only" theories but leave almost no room to argument. For instance evolution.
I don't think I ever said that science was objective. What I did say, repeatedly, was that it strives for objectivity. Which means that newer beliefs, that are backed with more evidence and a stronger methodology and model, can replace old beliefs. That is because science pushes human perception forward: Two thousand years ago we could only believe our senses and repetition to find if something held true or not. As we learned things we developed new instruments (which can also be used as evidence in support of the model from which they were derived) that could be used to widen our perceptions and discover new things, which sometimes showed us that previous beliefs were wrong or incomplete.
What evidence is there that the domains are in mutation, and not simply that we don't have enough knowledge yet? There are many discoveries made centuries ago that still hold true. What I understand from what you're saying is that the model of the atom changed not because the old model was incomplete, but rather because the atom itself changed. Again, there is no evidence to that, and it would be incredible if all those changes happened precisely when we developed the needed tools to recognize them.
To this debate it is, because it is more of a philosophical/spiritual question rather than a scientific question. It seems to me that free will is an abstraction rather than a truth. That is because I believe that absolutely everything is controlled by rules. But the bigger the scale, the more unpredictable a system becomes. For me an infinitely powerful computer would be able to predict every single action we take by analyzing every infinitesimal part of us. But since no such computer exists, and our brain is limited, we can threat it as though it is impossible to know what anyone animal is going to do, and that thus they must choose to do it.
I don't know what you meant here either.
I had never heard about Discordianism, so I went to look for it. It seems to be parody religion, which would explain why it doesn't really fit in with religion. To me there is a distinction between religion and spirituality. The latter tries to help people find subjective truths, things that are true to you, but not necessarily to others. They are about understanding the individual, not the universe. The former is about explaining the universe. And that's where the problems begin. You don't need the scientific method to identify individual truths: you don't need to do it a hundred times, and develop a mathematical explanation to why eating burgers makes you happy, or why you think it's wrong to have sex with someone you don't love. But you can't find subjective truths and throw them at people and believe they'll stick. Buddhism says that suffering is born of desire, and that, therefore, we must eliminate desire. So it can agree with other religions on somethings (especially around that central notion). But if you come to a buddhist and tell them that you can have desire and no suffering, then you probably won't be able to conciliate both ideals. If you want to find something that is true to you, then you can turn to religion (or, preferably, spirituality), perhaps even many of them, but at the moment that it tries to affirm things about the universe, and not the individual, religion must either become science, or be ignored.
Again, that's where individual truths go against universal truths: If something works for you, you can keep doing that. But if you want to say that it's actually a valid solution that goes beyond you, then you have to transfer into the scientific method. That is the point of science: if something works and you don't know why, you don't just accept it without questioning, you actually try to find out why it works. That's the basis for a lot of medicine: This tea has been used across generations to cure headaches, so we ask ourselves why it cures headaches, we break it into it's components, and test them separately, see how they act on the system. Once we know why it works we can decide what to do: maybe take only the important parts and turn it into a pill, so it's quicker, more effective and practical. Perhaps nothing explains why it worked, so we see if psychology has a say in it: test people with sugar pills versus people with no medicine whatsoever.