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

[Elixir]

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

We have a solid model of something.

Zackly. We have a limited agreed upon external “reality” about which we can share a somewhat common narrative. We can sell ourselves more narratives about how closely our narrative approaches that agreed upon reality. But none of us knows exactly how closely our own narrative even approaches that of others with whom we “agree”, let alone how it relates to this agreed upon external reality.

I have amazed myself at things I can not only get wrong, but also delay recognition of the wrongness because to recognize it means work and I’m lazy. Meanwhile that flaw (all the flaws) in my narrative persists. So it’s safe for me to assume that my narrative, and by projection, other people’s narratives, are riddled with flaws; I see things that are not there and remain blind to what’s in front of me. Yet, this external reality has not yet stamped me out of existence for holding false views, and continues to appear to comply with a lot of things my flawed understanding would predict. Has to be the beneficence of GAWD.

 

[rousseau]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

 

[pood]

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.

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.

 

[rousseau]

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.

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.

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.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

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

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?

 

[pood]

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.

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.

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.

Not sure why you think I am disagreeing with you. I take your point on our species-wide success in modeling reality, whatever that is, exactly, while individuals will usually not have the same level of understanding.

I’m merely pointing out the anti-realist position — that our best theories can be empirically adequate and instrumentally useful, without converging on truth. And that, pertinent to the OP, it may be that all our best science and math really boil down to narratives.

 

[pood]

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

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?

The realist thinks our science converges on truth, the anti-realist denies this. That’s more than a semantic difference.

 

[pood]

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. 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.

 

[Politesse]

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.

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?

 

[Elixir]

So how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Smaller than that. MUCH smaller.

 

[pood]

At the end of the 19th century, it was boldly proclaimed that the field of physics was just about all wrapped up, with a few loose ends here and there. Those loose ends turned into relativity theory and quantum theory, completely upending physics. In the late 20th century it was thought that were were on the edge of a unified theory of everything, in which the nature of reality could be reproduced on a T-shirt in the form of an equation. A unified theory now seems more remote than ever, while QM and relativity disagree with each other. We also have string theory, elegant mathematic that unfortunately have no empirical backing and may not be amenable to empirical justification even in principle.

 

[Politesse]

So how big is our perceptive window into the universe?

Smaller than that. MUCH smaller.

Indeed.

When I teach intro to archaeology, I dump out a thousand piece puzzle, then have student groups choose five pieces at random. Their task is to interpret whatever is going on in the scene based on the evidence they possess.

Then, I introduce site formation processes, and explain why any archaeologist would love to have access to a full 200th of the materials that were once present at a site! I gave them five pieces rather than one, because with five you have the ability to form theories and assumptions about the puzzle. Something to do with their twenty minutes. A fair sample. Maybe a chance at a correct hypothesis or two. But it would be more accurate to life if I cut all the pieces into quarters, removed most of them from the table, and then let them pick their five.

Archaeological knowledge sounds impressive in an encyclopedia. Compelling but head scratching in an academic article. But the "grey literature"? A well-written site report leaves you with far, far more questions than answers. Because it hasn't been narrativized yet, it is hard to understand and the holes in our knowledge are obvious. Your average Magdalenian phase site is just the use surface left by what used to be a hearth. If you're incredibly lucky, maybe a few bulk bone fragments of the last few meals cooked on it and everyone gets all excited. It is not much with which to reconstruct a culture!

 

[rousseau]

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.

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?

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.

 

[pood]

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.

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?

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.

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.

 

[rousseau]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

 

[pood]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

“relevant to us…” yes, those are theories that are empirically adequate and instrumentally useful, like Ptolemy’s geocentric model. Doesn’t mean they are true, or even close to true.

Why is our “knowledge” more “reliable” now, than it was then?

And I am not “generalizing” to every field of study from physics, though per Politesse, look how defeasible “knowledge” is in the field of archaeology. Meanwhile the philosophy of history shows the limits and pitfalls of historiography. I’m sure most fields of study are shot through with what in science is known as theory underdetermination — the principle that practically an infinite number of theories can account for a data set, if we adjust auxiliary assumptions, which themselves are … assumptions.

 

[Politesse]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

 

[bilby]

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.

How do you know this?

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.

Sure, but then he is left with no way to even begin to address my last question...

 

[bilby]

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

Absolutely. The physics of everyday phenomena are completely understood.

Everything that happens on scales available to unassisted human senses, and to at least a few orders of magintude above and below that scale, is understood completely.

We don't understand what happens in neutron stars, quasars, or black holes; Nor do we know whether gravity and quantum mechanics can be reconciled. And these areas of ignorance are demonstrably able to become important - for cutting edge technologies like super light-weight batteries, high speed CPUs and GPUs, satellite communications, medical imaging, etc., etc.

But for everyday life? We, as a species, know it all. There might be more of it than we can process - for example in weather forecasting - but even chaotic systems are comprehensible, if not accurately predictable to arbitrary precision.

We certainly know enough to dismiss certain classes of claim as absurd.

 

[rousseau]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

As far as history goes we're doing pretty good as well, but when we're talking events that happened a couple thousand years ago, or further, events that were prehistoric, uncertainty is unavoidable. When we're talking phenomena that can be directly measured now, a little more certainty is to be expected.

I won't lie, though, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at with this post.