Do we think & communicate (almost) entirely in fabricated stories?

pood said:

rousseau said:

If we can send a rocket ship to the moon, fly airplanes over oceans, and develop vaccines, we have a solid model of reality.

Click to expand...

We have a solid model of something.

Click to expand...

pood said:

rousseau said:

pood said:

rousseau said:

pood said:

rousseau said:

pood said:

rousseau said:

abaddon said:

rousseau said:

The knowledge about the material universe is there, it exists, but most people have a hard time accessing that knowledge, understanding that knowledge, and piecing it together in a way to see deeper truth.

Click to expand...

I think there has to be an objective reality, whether we access it or not. It can't just be a bunch of brains each with their own created worlds inside of them, and nothing else. But I don't agree with you about some "experts" who access "the noumena" using a limited tool like science. Maybe some science-based guesses can be made and math would be the better tool for it than language, for the reason that language is metaphors (so humans cannot get outside of stories while using it).

The universe as "material" is a story. No one knows that the universe is "nothing but matter" or "nothing but consciousness", or whatever other story about what the fundamental nature of phenomena they want to tell.

I'm not looking out of my eyes at the screen just now. The screen is "here" in the same space as all my thoughts and memories and feelings... the whole universe, as known to me, is "here" in that same space. When I stick with the first-person POV then there's no "me in here" and a "world out there".

But when I start talking about "external reality", it bifurcates reality into two -- the phenomena alleged to be inside our skulls and the noumena that is alleged to be outside our skulls. So this fellow that @pood mentioned, Wheeler, "agonized" because he thought he's inside his skull and then doubted any "outside".

IMO he should have doubted the dualism (in here/out there) better.

I mentioned metaphysical idealism in passing a few years back, and an engineer said "Idealism? That's solipsism!" I thought on that, and the more I did, the more clear it was that physicalism is solipsistic and idealism is not.

In the physicalist story, there are 8 billion different brains each doing their things wholly separate from each other (after all, what's the connection if mentality is confined to brains?).

In the metaphysical idealist story (and in cosmological panpsychism) there's one "brain", the universe, and we're events in it. So there's one consciousness and each little tidbit, that seems (but only just seems) like its own individual being, shares in it. So there isn't empty space between the activity of this brain and the activity of that brain...

However, if you feel more convinced of the physicalism story, science isn't your escape from the isolation it imposes. The reason is, as I was saying in my earlier post, science's consensus knowledge isn't agreement about the noumena but about the phenomena.

@pood's been making an important point. Science has a notable limitation -- it measures the behaviors of phenomena but cannot get to the fundamental nature of what the phenomena are.

This limit was a conscious choice back in Galileo's day. Spirit-matter dualism was the shared worldview at that time, and smart folk like Galileo knew spirit isn't measurable for being immaterial. So he and others decided that science's focus must be on matter, and spirit would be ignored by science - they left it in a different "magisteria". Then in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, folk decided, in effect, "let's just forget that whole other magisterium, the spirit or mind... all of reality is matter only!" Science cannot demonstrate that -- the maneuver is made in order to seem like they have a completed "true" story. But, again, science's "objectivity" is people inter-subjectively agreeing about what phenomena they experience. So if there's a noumena "out there" (which I doubt, since I lean towards believing idealism) then you don't get there from science.

Click to expand...

I'm not really understanding what your objection is to the universe being made of matter. As you put it - the universe isn't nothing but matter - so you seem to be hinting at a kind of rejection of physicalism, an abhorrence of physicalism. I don't really consider myself a 'physicalist', and I don't say things like 'it's all just matter', but the universe is clearly made of matter that follows natural law. What else would it be?

When we talk of spirituality I think what we're really talking about is something that's unique to humans, but not ubiquitous in humans. Many people do not lead spiritual lives, but some absolutely do. Spirituality has nothing to do with the substrate of the physical world, and everything to do with intent. People who live their lives based on principles that are outside of pure economics, I would argue, are spiritual.

Science is able to do an extremely good job of describing the material world and how it functions, but it isn't limitlessly predictive. You can usually predict what a squirrel is going to do, the same isn't always true of people. I think that's where we enter the domain of what science can't touch. But general laws are still there.

Click to expand...

I don’t think there is an “objection” here to the universe being made of matter, but a questioning of the underlying meaning of matter. Einstein pursued a line of thought that matter/energy was nothing more than particular configurations of spacetime, and as noted in the “unraveling” thread, many scientists today question the fundamentality of spacetime itself. The metaphysical idealist position is that the universe is made primarily, or wholly, of mental states. Schopenhauer, long before modern physics, advanced the idea that the world did not exist until the first eye opened.

Click to expand...

If that's the case it feels like a tangential point. All I'm trying to say is that the material universe can be modelled, for the most part, which doesn't seem to be negated by this definition of metaphysical idealism. I'm not making a metaphysical claim that everything is just matter, but I am claiming that everything in the known universe follows natural laws which can be known, or at least what is known now can be known.

Click to expand...

Well, could be a side issue, but I don’t think there are any natural laws at all. What we call “law” or “natural laws” are mostly successful descriptions of things that we can measure and test, which may be a small subset of whatever reality is. And most of these descriptions, like the thermodynamic “laws,” may turn out to be statistical in nature and not at all invariant.

Click to expand...

Fair enough. I'm more likely to go the opposite way, I'm of the opinion that the knowledge gathered by academia (not just science) as well as religion gives us an intricate understanding of reality.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

Click to expand...

Not sure what intricate understanding of reality religion provides. As for science, it observes, tests, and measures aspects of reality amenable to such, and builds models of the world, but at best these models are rough approximations, like a map to the territory. And much of the territory may not be mappable, but of course in that case, that particular territory would be irrelevant to us. And I leave open the possibility that even these science maps are maps of our mental states.

A dog would map a library by the scent of its books, conclude they’re not edible, and that would be a good enough model of reality for her. But it would have nothing to do with what books really are (to us).

Click to expand...

Sociology would call religion an early form of science. Not all is useful and most of it's been eclipsed by modern science, but IMO eastern religions say some things which are still useful.

On what basis do you say that science only provides a rough approximation of reality? I don't really understand this claim in the light of the enormous amount we do know about reality and how predictive that knowledge has been. Can you give an example of some domain that we might not have broached yet? From where I'm standing our collective knowledge looks pretty robust.

Click to expand...

The scientific anti-realist argues that empirical adequacy, and not truth, is the aim of science, and that what science does is give us stories that we can tell about the world and mostly agree upon. There is that narrative strain again!

Click to expand...

rousseau said:

Not to harp on the point but this isn't really a basis for your argument, it's just repeating a claim which doesn't really substantiate anything.

Click to expand...

pood said:

rousseau said:

Not to harp on the point but this isn't really a basis for your argument, it's just repeating a claim which doesn't really substantiate anything.

Click to expand...

I’m not sure what you think I am trying to substantiate. I don’t think I am trying to substantiate anything, but just pointing out philosophical positions. Anti-realism is a metaphysical position about science. Theories can be both empirically adequate and instrumentally useful, without touching on truth, if there even is a truth to be met. Newton’s three “laws” are empirically adequate and instrumentally useful, but break down at high speeds (relativity) and at small scales (quantum). But they remain good for government work. Then we find that high speeds (relativity and later GR) and then small scales (quantum) do not agree with each other, so one or both theories must be wrong to some extent. And so it goes.

I mentioned James’s analogy of a dog in a library. A dog might posit an empirically adequate and instrumentally useful theory about books: books don’t smell like food (empirically adequate) so don’t try to eat them (instrumentally useful). But the dog’s theory says nothing about books as they are to us, in a wider context outside of their own.

The anti-realist is simply saying don’t expect science to supply truth. It might not even be possible.

Click to expand...

pood said:

The anti-realist is simply saying don’t expect science to supply truth. It might not even be possible.

Click to expand...

rousseau said:

pood said:

rousseau said:

Not to harp on the point but this isn't really a basis for your argument, it's just repeating a claim which doesn't really substantiate anything.

Click to expand...

I’m not sure what you think I am trying to substantiate. I don’t think I am trying to substantiate anything, but just pointing out philosophical positions. Anti-realism is a metaphysical position about science. Theories can be both empirically adequate and instrumentally useful, without touching on truth, if there even is a truth to be met. Newton’s three “laws” are empirically adequate and instrumentally useful, but break down at high speeds (relativity) and at small scales (quantum). But they remain good for government work. Then we find that high speeds (relativity and later GR) and then small scales (quantum) do not agree with each other, so one or both theories must be wrong to some extent. And so it goes.

I mentioned James’s analogy of a dog in a library. A dog might posit an empirically adequate and instrumentally useful theory about books: books don’t smell like food (empirically adequate) so don’t try to eat them (instrumentally useful). But the dog’s theory says nothing about books as they are to us, in a wider context outside of their own.

The anti-realist is simply saying don’t expect science to supply truth. It might not even be possible.

Click to expand...

My mistake, I thought I was replying to your position, not an anti-realist one. Then I guess I disagree with anti-realists. I don't think I'm going to make any more headway on my position, though, so I'll bow out here. But I will add the basis for my disagreement with anti-realists.

There is a university in my city with in the vicinity of 10 different libraries. Just one of them is a science library. It has four floors of just material science books, literally tens of thousand of books mapping out every aspect of the material world. Evolutionary theory, geology, biology, environmental science, genetics, psychology, prehistory, medicine, astronomy, you name it. Evolutionary theory alone has allowed us to understand the heuristic behind every aspect of invertebrate and vertebrate physiology. In the medical world we've developed cures for innumerable ailments. We can know, to a very fine degree, the molecular reactions happening throughout our body when we take a medication. This is just a (small) part of evolution and medicine, in one library, filled with a huge number of other subjects.

The same university has an even larger social science library, bigger, more floors. I don't even think I can categorize what's contained in this library, probably over a hundred thousand books from academics all over the world who've spent the past century modeling reality.

This is just two of the libraries at the university, there's also a business, music, religious, educational, you get the idea. In all we're probably talking in the vicinity of a quarter million books that are attempting to model reality. That is an alarming amount of knowledge.

Sure there might be a philosophical argument to be made that some of our modelling isn't right all the time, and that at times it's just an approximation. But given the scope of what we've achieved in that modeling in the past century I have a very hard time believing anything other than the fact that people, collectively, have a solid model of reality. But this goes back to my argument that individuals do not have that same understanding, or usually don't.

I agree with the point that science can't provide all of it, but this is because some concepts are outside of the Overton window and can't be spoken.

Click to expand...

T.G.G. Moogly said:

pood said:

The anti-realist is simply saying don’t expect science to supply truth. It might not even be possible.

Click to expand...

So what are we left to discern the difference between the realist and the anti realist other than semantics and language? Wouldn't an outside observer see no quantifiable difference between the two?

Click to expand...

rousseau said:

My mistake, I thought I was replying to your position, not an anti-realist one. Then I guess I disagree with anti-realists. I don't think I'm going to make any more headway on my position, though, so I'll bow out here. But I will add the basis for my disagreement with anti-realists.

There is a university in my city with in the vicinity of 10 different libraries. Just one of them is a science library. It has four floors of just material science books, literally tens of thousand of books mapping out every aspect of the material world. Evolutionary theory, geology, biology, environmental science, genetics, psychology, prehistory, medicine, astronomy, you name it. Evolutionary theory alone has allowed us to understand the heuristic behind every aspect of invertebrate and vertebrate physiology. In the medical world we've developed cures for innumerable ailments. We can know, to a very fine degree, the molecular reactions happening throughout our body when we take a medication. This is just a (small) part of evolution and medicine, in one library, filled with a huge number of other subjects.

The same university has an even larger social science library, bigger, more floors. I don't even think I can categorize what's contained in this library, probably over a hundred thousand books from academics all over the world who've spent the past century modeling reality.

This is just two of the libraries at the university, there's also a business, music, religious, educational, you get the idea. In all we're probably talking in the vicinity of a quarter million books that are attempting to model reality. That is an alarming amount of knowledge.

Sure there might be a philosophical argument to be made that some of our modelling isn't right all the time, and that at times it's just an approximation. But given the scope of what we've achieved in that modeling in the past century I have a very hard time believing anything other than the fact that people, collectively, have a solid model of reality. But this goes back to my argument that individuals do not have that same understanding, or usually don't.

I agree with the point that science can't provide all of it, but this is because some concepts are outside of the Overton window and can't be spoken.

Click to expand...

Politesse said:

So how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Click to expand...

Elixir said:

Politesse said:

So how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Click to expand...

Smaller than that. MUCH smaller.

Click to expand...

Politesse said:

rousseau said:

My mistake, I thought I was replying to your position, not an anti-realist one. Then I guess I disagree with anti-realists. I don't think I'm going to make any more headway on my position, though, so I'll bow out here. But I will add the basis for my disagreement with anti-realists.

There is a university in my city with in the vicinity of 10 different libraries. Just one of them is a science library. It has four floors of just material science books, literally tens of thousand of books mapping out every aspect of the material world. Evolutionary theory, geology, biology, environmental science, genetics, psychology, prehistory, medicine, astronomy, you name it. Evolutionary theory alone has allowed us to understand the heuristic behind every aspect of invertebrate and vertebrate physiology. In the medical world we've developed cures for innumerable ailments. We can know, to a very fine degree, the molecular reactions happening throughout our body when we take a medication. This is just a (small) part of evolution and medicine, in one library, filled with a huge number of other subjects.

The same university has an even larger social science library, bigger, more floors. I don't even think I can categorize what's contained in this library, probably over a hundred thousand books from academics all over the world who've spent the past century modeling reality.

This is just two of the libraries at the university, there's also a business, music, religious, educational, you get the idea. In all we're probably talking in the vicinity of a quarter million books that are attempting to model reality. That is an alarming amount of knowledge.

Sure there might be a philosophical argument to be made that some of our modelling isn't right all the time, and that at times it's just an approximation. But given the scope of what we've achieved in that modeling in the past century I have a very hard time believing anything other than the fact that people, collectively, have a solid model of reality. But this goes back to my argument that individuals do not have that same understanding, or usually don't.

I agree with the point that science can't provide all of it, but this is because some concepts are outside of the Overton window and can't be spoken.

Click to expand...

And yet, ask the people who wrote those books whether they feel confident that the scientific questions they raised are satisfactorily resolved, and I know what almost all of them will answer. The more you really know about any given field, the less confident you become towards some of the fundamental assumptions it has to make. The accumulated bulk of human knowledge is fascinating in conception and immense in scale, but the universe is vast and complex beyond all of that imagining.

Suppose you walked into the library, picked out a random reference book, and memorized its contents word for word. It would be an impressive accomplishment on your part. You would no doubt learn quite a lot from the endeavor. Every subsequent study or conversation you had would be enriched. But it would not be reasonable to say that you now "know the library" because of your intense familiarity with that one book. Indeed, its author or editors would have an inequal influence on your way of thinking from that point onward.

So, how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Click to expand...

rousseau said:

Politesse said:

rousseau said:

My mistake, I thought I was replying to your position, not an anti-realist one. Then I guess I disagree with anti-realists. I don't think I'm going to make any more headway on my position, though, so I'll bow out here. But I will add the basis for my disagreement with anti-realists.

There is a university in my city with in the vicinity of 10 different libraries. Just one of them is a science library. It has four floors of just material science books, literally tens of thousand of books mapping out every aspect of the material world. Evolutionary theory, geology, biology, environmental science, genetics, psychology, prehistory, medicine, astronomy, you name it. Evolutionary theory alone has allowed us to understand the heuristic behind every aspect of invertebrate and vertebrate physiology. In the medical world we've developed cures for innumerable ailments. We can know, to a very fine degree, the molecular reactions happening throughout our body when we take a medication. This is just a (small) part of evolution and medicine, in one library, filled with a huge number of other subjects.

The same university has an even larger social science library, bigger, more floors. I don't even think I can categorize what's contained in this library, probably over a hundred thousand books from academics all over the world who've spent the past century modeling reality.

This is just two of the libraries at the university, there's also a business, music, religious, educational, you get the idea. In all we're probably talking in the vicinity of a quarter million books that are attempting to model reality. That is an alarming amount of knowledge.

Sure there might be a philosophical argument to be made that some of our modelling isn't right all the time, and that at times it's just an approximation. But given the scope of what we've achieved in that modeling in the past century I have a very hard time believing anything other than the fact that people, collectively, have a solid model of reality. But this goes back to my argument that individuals do not have that same understanding, or usually don't.

I agree with the point that science can't provide all of it, but this is because some concepts are outside of the Overton window and can't be spoken.

Click to expand...

And yet, ask the people who wrote those books whether they feel confident that the scientific questions they raised are satisfactorily resolved, and I know what almost all of them will answer. The more you really know about any given field, the less confident you become towards some of the fundamental assumptions it has to make. The accumulated bulk of human knowledge is fascinating in conception and immense in scale, but the universe is vast and complex beyond all of that imagining.

Suppose you walked into the library, picked out a random reference book, and memorized its contents word for word. It would be an impressive accomplishment on your part. You would no doubt learn quite a lot from the endeavor. Every subsequent study or conversation you had would be enriched. But it would not be reasonable to say that you now "know the library" because of your intense familiarity with that one book. Indeed, its author or editors would have an inequal influence on your way of thinking from that point onward.

So, how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Click to expand...

I think you'd find that quite a lot of them would agree that the scientific questions are fairly closed to resolved. Maybe not in the field of Anthropology, and some others, but in other fields we are close.

I get the point that you and others are making, but where I disagree is that I don't think we actually are that far off of a complete understanding, in practice. Are we 100% there? Of course not. But we're a hell of a lot closer now than we were in the 19th century.

And I also don't think this has anything to do with human architecture and our unique perception of the universe, I think we are modelling the universe accurately despite our architecture.

Click to expand...

pood said:

rousseau said:

Politesse said:

rousseau said:

My mistake, I thought I was replying to your position, not an anti-realist one. Then I guess I disagree with anti-realists. I don't think I'm going to make any more headway on my position, though, so I'll bow out here. But I will add the basis for my disagreement with anti-realists.

There is a university in my city with in the vicinity of 10 different libraries. Just one of them is a science library. It has four floors of just material science books, literally tens of thousand of books mapping out every aspect of the material world. Evolutionary theory, geology, biology, environmental science, genetics, psychology, prehistory, medicine, astronomy, you name it. Evolutionary theory alone has allowed us to understand the heuristic behind every aspect of invertebrate and vertebrate physiology. In the medical world we've developed cures for innumerable ailments. We can know, to a very fine degree, the molecular reactions happening throughout our body when we take a medication. This is just a (small) part of evolution and medicine, in one library, filled with a huge number of other subjects.

The same university has an even larger social science library, bigger, more floors. I don't even think I can categorize what's contained in this library, probably over a hundred thousand books from academics all over the world who've spent the past century modeling reality.

This is just two of the libraries at the university, there's also a business, music, religious, educational, you get the idea. In all we're probably talking in the vicinity of a quarter million books that are attempting to model reality. That is an alarming amount of knowledge.

Sure there might be a philosophical argument to be made that some of our modelling isn't right all the time, and that at times it's just an approximation. But given the scope of what we've achieved in that modeling in the past century I have a very hard time believing anything other than the fact that people, collectively, have a solid model of reality. But this goes back to my argument that individuals do not have that same understanding, or usually don't.

I agree with the point that science can't provide all of it, but this is because some concepts are outside of the Overton window and can't be spoken.

Click to expand...

And yet, ask the people who wrote those books whether they feel confident that the scientific questions they raised are satisfactorily resolved, and I know what almost all of them will answer. The more you really know about any given field, the less confident you become towards some of the fundamental assumptions it has to make. The accumulated bulk of human knowledge is fascinating in conception and immense in scale, but the universe is vast and complex beyond all of that imagining.

Suppose you walked into the library, picked out a random reference book, and memorized its contents word for word. It would be an impressive accomplishment on your part. You would no doubt learn quite a lot from the endeavor. Every subsequent study or conversation you had would be enriched. But it would not be reasonable to say that you now "know the library" because of your intense familiarity with that one book. Indeed, its author or editors would have an inequal influence on your way of thinking from that point onward.

So, how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Click to expand...

I think you'd find that quite a lot of them would agree that the scientific questions are fairly closed to resolved. Maybe not in the field of Anthropology, and some others, but in other fields we are close.

I get the point that you and others are making, but where I disagree is that I don't think we actually are that far off of a complete understanding, in practice. Are we 100% there? Of course not. But we're a hell of a lot closer now than we were in the 19th century.

And I also don't think this has anything to do with human architecture and our unique perception of the universe, I think we are modelling the universe accurately despite our architecture.

Click to expand...

It certainly does not seem to be the case that we are anywhere near the complete understanding you speak of. We have no unified theory and no prospect of one, it seems; we have no quantum theory of gravity and hence to reconciliation of QM and relativity; we have no idea what to do with string theory, how to test it, or even whether it qualifies as real science. We don’t know what dark matter is, or even whether it is real; we have irreconcilable models of the universe going to either a Big Rip or a Big Crunch. We don’t even know and may never know whether an external reality exists or everything comes back to us; see the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. The fact that we “know” more than people did in the 19th century does not make our supposed knowledge more reliable or complete than theirs was back then, and I as I noted, in the late 19th century scientists were bodly proclaiming the end of physics, with everything solved. So it goes.

Click to expand...

rousseau said:

pood said:

rousseau said:

Politesse said:

rousseau said:

My mistake, I thought I was replying to your position, not an anti-realist one. Then I guess I disagree with anti-realists. I don't think I'm going to make any more headway on my position, though, so I'll bow out here. But I will add the basis for my disagreement with anti-realists.

There is a university in my city with in the vicinity of 10 different libraries. Just one of them is a science library. It has four floors of just material science books, literally tens of thousand of books mapping out every aspect of the material world. Evolutionary theory, geology, biology, environmental science, genetics, psychology, prehistory, medicine, astronomy, you name it. Evolutionary theory alone has allowed us to understand the heuristic behind every aspect of invertebrate and vertebrate physiology. In the medical world we've developed cures for innumerable ailments. We can know, to a very fine degree, the molecular reactions happening throughout our body when we take a medication. This is just a (small) part of evolution and medicine, in one library, filled with a huge number of other subjects.

The same university has an even larger social science library, bigger, more floors. I don't even think I can categorize what's contained in this library, probably over a hundred thousand books from academics all over the world who've spent the past century modeling reality.

This is just two of the libraries at the university, there's also a business, music, religious, educational, you get the idea. In all we're probably talking in the vicinity of a quarter million books that are attempting to model reality. That is an alarming amount of knowledge.

Sure there might be a philosophical argument to be made that some of our modelling isn't right all the time, and that at times it's just an approximation. But given the scope of what we've achieved in that modeling in the past century I have a very hard time believing anything other than the fact that people, collectively, have a solid model of reality. But this goes back to my argument that individuals do not have that same understanding, or usually don't.

I agree with the point that science can't provide all of it, but this is because some concepts are outside of the Overton window and can't be spoken.

Click to expand...

And yet, ask the people who wrote those books whether they feel confident that the scientific questions they raised are satisfactorily resolved, and I know what almost all of them will answer. The more you really know about any given field, the less confident you become towards some of the fundamental assumptions it has to make. The accumulated bulk of human knowledge is fascinating in conception and immense in scale, but the universe is vast and complex beyond all of that imagining.

Suppose you walked into the library, picked out a random reference book, and memorized its contents word for word. It would be an impressive accomplishment on your part. You would no doubt learn quite a lot from the endeavor. Every subsequent study or conversation you had would be enriched. But it would not be reasonable to say that you now "know the library" because of your intense familiarity with that one book. Indeed, its author or editors would have an inequal influence on your way of thinking from that point onward.

So, how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Click to expand...

I think you'd find that quite a lot of them would agree that the scientific questions are fairly closed to resolved. Maybe not in the field of Anthropology, and some others, but in other fields we are close.

I get the point that you and others are making, but where I disagree is that I don't think we actually are that far off of a complete understanding, in practice. Are we 100% there? Of course not. But we're a hell of a lot closer now than we were in the 19th century.

And I also don't think this has anything to do with human architecture and our unique perception of the universe, I think we are modelling the universe accurately despite our architecture.

Click to expand...

It certainly does not seem to be the case that we are anywhere near the complete understanding you speak of. We have no unified theory and no prospect of one, it seems; we have no quantum theory of gravity and hence to reconciliation of QM and relativity; we have no idea what to do with string theory, how to test it, or even whether it qualifies as real science. We don’t know what dark matter is, or even whether it is real; we have irreconcilable models of the universe going to either a Big Rip or a Big Crunch. We don’t even know and may never know whether an external reality exists or everything comes back to us; see the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. The fact that we “know” more than people did in the 19th century does not make our supposed knowledge more reliable or complete than theirs was back then, and I as I noted, in the late 19th century scientists were bodly proclaiming the end of physics, with everything solved. So it goes.

Click to expand...

You're listing out a few elements of one field and generalizing it to every field of study. I'm admittedly not an expert in physics, but do we know enough physics to understand phenomena that are relevant to us? I would say that the answer to this is yes.

And of course our knowledge now is more reliable than what we had in the 19th century. I'm sorry but some of this is starting to look like handwaving.

Click to expand...

rousseau said:

pood said:

rousseau said:

Politesse said:

rousseau said:

My mistake, I thought I was replying to your position, not an anti-realist one. Then I guess I disagree with anti-realists. I don't think I'm going to make any more headway on my position, though, so I'll bow out here. But I will add the basis for my disagreement with anti-realists.

There is a university in my city with in the vicinity of 10 different libraries. Just one of them is a science library. It has four floors of just material science books, literally tens of thousand of books mapping out every aspect of the material world. Evolutionary theory, geology, biology, environmental science, genetics, psychology, prehistory, medicine, astronomy, you name it. Evolutionary theory alone has allowed us to understand the heuristic behind every aspect of invertebrate and vertebrate physiology. In the medical world we've developed cures for innumerable ailments. We can know, to a very fine degree, the molecular reactions happening throughout our body when we take a medication. This is just a (small) part of evolution and medicine, in one library, filled with a huge number of other subjects.

The same university has an even larger social science library, bigger, more floors. I don't even think I can categorize what's contained in this library, probably over a hundred thousand books from academics all over the world who've spent the past century modeling reality.

This is just two of the libraries at the university, there's also a business, music, religious, educational, you get the idea. In all we're probably talking in the vicinity of a quarter million books that are attempting to model reality. That is an alarming amount of knowledge.

Sure there might be a philosophical argument to be made that some of our modelling isn't right all the time, and that at times it's just an approximation. But given the scope of what we've achieved in that modeling in the past century I have a very hard time believing anything other than the fact that people, collectively, have a solid model of reality. But this goes back to my argument that individuals do not have that same understanding, or usually don't.

I agree with the point that science can't provide all of it, but this is because some concepts are outside of the Overton window and can't be spoken.

Click to expand...

And yet, ask the people who wrote those books whether they feel confident that the scientific questions they raised are satisfactorily resolved, and I know what almost all of them will answer. The more you really know about any given field, the less confident you become towards some of the fundamental assumptions it has to make. The accumulated bulk of human knowledge is fascinating in conception and immense in scale, but the universe is vast and complex beyond all of that imagining.

Suppose you walked into the library, picked out a random reference book, and memorized its contents word for word. It would be an impressive accomplishment on your part. You would no doubt learn quite a lot from the endeavor. Every subsequent study or conversation you had would be enriched. But it would not be reasonable to say that you now "know the library" because of your intense familiarity with that one book. Indeed, its author or editors would have an inequal influence on your way of thinking from that point onward.

So, how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Click to expand...

I think you'd find that quite a lot of them would agree that the scientific questions are fairly closed to resolved. Maybe not in the field of Anthropology, and some others, but in other fields we are close.

I get the point that you and others are making, but where I disagree is that I don't think we actually are that far off of a complete understanding, in practice. Are we 100% there? Of course not. But we're a hell of a lot closer now than we were in the 19th century.

And I also don't think this has anything to do with human architecture and our unique perception of the universe, I think we are modelling the universe accurately despite our architecture.

Click to expand...

It certainly does not seem to be the case that we are anywhere near the complete understanding you speak of. We have no unified theory and no prospect of one, it seems; we have no quantum theory of gravity and hence to reconciliation of QM and relativity; we have no idea what to do with string theory, how to test it, or even whether it qualifies as real science. We don’t know what dark matter is, or even whether it is real; we have irreconcilable models of the universe going to either a Big Rip or a Big Crunch. We don’t even know and may never know whether an external reality exists or everything comes back to us; see the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. The fact that we “know” more than people did in the 19th century does not make our supposed knowledge more reliable or complete than theirs was back then, and I as I noted, in the late 19th century scientists were bodly proclaiming the end of physics, with everything solved. So it goes.

Click to expand...

You're listing out a few elements of one field and generalizing it to every field of study. I'm admittedly not an expert in physics, but do we know enough physics to understand phenomena that are relevant to us? I would say that the answer to this is yes.

And of course our knowledge now is more reliable than what we had in the 19th century. I'm sorry but some of this is starting to look like handwaving.

Click to expand...

pood said:

The Ptolemaic geocentric view was empirically adequate and instrumentally useful for navigation for more than a thousand years. However, it certainly didn’t converge on the truth.

Click to expand...

pood said:

As mentioned, the pessimistic meta-induction counsels that we should treat all our current theories as likely to be strictly false, no matter how empirically adequate and instrumentally useful they are now.

Click to expand...

rousseau said:

do we know enough physics to understand phenomena that are relevant to us?

Click to expand...

Politesse said:

rousseau said:

pood said:

rousseau said:

Politesse said:

rousseau said:

My mistake, I thought I was replying to your position, not an anti-realist one. Then I guess I disagree with anti-realists. I don't think I'm going to make any more headway on my position, though, so I'll bow out here. But I will add the basis for my disagreement with anti-realists.

There is a university in my city with in the vicinity of 10 different libraries. Just one of them is a science library. It has four floors of just material science books, literally tens of thousand of books mapping out every aspect of the material world. Evolutionary theory, geology, biology, environmental science, genetics, psychology, prehistory, medicine, astronomy, you name it. Evolutionary theory alone has allowed us to understand the heuristic behind every aspect of invertebrate and vertebrate physiology. In the medical world we've developed cures for innumerable ailments. We can know, to a very fine degree, the molecular reactions happening throughout our body when we take a medication. This is just a (small) part of evolution and medicine, in one library, filled with a huge number of other subjects.

The same university has an even larger social science library, bigger, more floors. I don't even think I can categorize what's contained in this library, probably over a hundred thousand books from academics all over the world who've spent the past century modeling reality.

This is just two of the libraries at the university, there's also a business, music, religious, educational, you get the idea. In all we're probably talking in the vicinity of a quarter million books that are attempting to model reality. That is an alarming amount of knowledge.

Sure there might be a philosophical argument to be made that some of our modelling isn't right all the time, and that at times it's just an approximation. But given the scope of what we've achieved in that modeling in the past century I have a very hard time believing anything other than the fact that people, collectively, have a solid model of reality. But this goes back to my argument that individuals do not have that same understanding, or usually don't.

I agree with the point that science can't provide all of it, but this is because some concepts are outside of the Overton window and can't be spoken.

Click to expand...

And yet, ask the people who wrote those books whether they feel confident that the scientific questions they raised are satisfactorily resolved, and I know what almost all of them will answer. The more you really know about any given field, the less confident you become towards some of the fundamental assumptions it has to make. The accumulated bulk of human knowledge is fascinating in conception and immense in scale, but the universe is vast and complex beyond all of that imagining.

Suppose you walked into the library, picked out a random reference book, and memorized its contents word for word. It would be an impressive accomplishment on your part. You would no doubt learn quite a lot from the endeavor. Every subsequent study or conversation you had would be enriched. But it would not be reasonable to say that you now "know the library" because of your intense familiarity with that one book. Indeed, its author or editors would have an inequal influence on your way of thinking from that point onward.

So, how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Click to expand...

I think you'd find that quite a lot of them would agree that the scientific questions are fairly closed to resolved. Maybe not in the field of Anthropology, and some others, but in other fields we are close.

I get the point that you and others are making, but where I disagree is that I don't think we actually are that far off of a complete understanding, in practice. Are we 100% there? Of course not. But we're a hell of a lot closer now than we were in the 19th century.

And I also don't think this has anything to do with human architecture and our unique perception of the universe, I think we are modelling the universe accurately despite our architecture.

Click to expand...

It certainly does not seem to be the case that we are anywhere near the complete understanding you speak of. We have no unified theory and no prospect of one, it seems; we have no quantum theory of gravity and hence to reconciliation of QM and relativity; we have no idea what to do with string theory, how to test it, or even whether it qualifies as real science. We don’t know what dark matter is, or even whether it is real; we have irreconcilable models of the universe going to either a Big Rip or a Big Crunch. We don’t even know and may never know whether an external reality exists or everything comes back to us; see the physicist John Archibald Wheeler. The fact that we “know” more than people did in the 19th century does not make our supposed knowledge more reliable or complete than theirs was back then, and I as I noted, in the late 19th century scientists were bodly proclaiming the end of physics, with everything solved. So it goes.

Click to expand...

You're listing out a few elements of one field and generalizing it to every field of study. I'm admittedly not an expert in physics, but do we know enough physics to understand phenomena that are relevant to us? I would say that the answer to this is yes.

And of course our knowledge now is more reliable than what we had in the 19th century. I'm sorry but some of this is starting to look like handwaving.

Click to expand...

So... we should be doubtful of our knowledge of a simple question like the history of our own species, on our own planet, but utterly confident in our guesses about subatomic interactions and the birth of the universe?

Click to expand...