I propose that:
because we cannot account for all information and there is no evidence that we ever will,
because there are an infinite "amount" (technically infinity can't be an amount or value, but you get what I'm saying) of possible out-comes, variables and ideas,
because all logical conclusions can eventually be reduced to an axiom,
that the following conclusion applies: there is a 1 out of infinity chance of being 100% right about any conclusion you make, and thus there is no reason to 100% believe any particular idea or religion or philosophy.
paradox: this entire conclusion could be wrong by it's own parameters, but a possible resolution that we would merely regress to a previous state of being anyway where we already no one had any evidence to confirm any conclusion 100%, there is still no way to prove anything 100% anyway. No matter what you think you know, there could always be information you don't know about that makes your conclusion not true. But I guess it would be a bit like saying "This statement could be false".
So, just be open minded about other ideas, because even if you think an invisible purple intangible unicorn is crazy, you could be surprised one day. Maybe there's a few extra spacial dimensions we don't know about.
"what about all the science we've done"? Well it's funny you should say that because I've been working with science for a long time, and if there's one thing that sticks out, it's that the entire perspective of the scientific community keeps changing. Remember how the Earth was flat and everything fell at the same rate? Well Aristotle was wrong and Newton had better approximations to described what he saw. You know those "laws" of motion? They're wrong, Newton was utterly wrong (except for technically calculus), and it turned out Einstein had better approximations. Then, it turns out Einstein wasn't 100% correct and now using the information of Enrico Fermi, Feynman, Planck and Debroglie and Schrodinger and ect, we keep coming up with newer and newer models to better approximate our observations, because science is only based on what we observe, not on an arbitrary assumption of correctness, and so we can never say that what we observe is "correct", there's no connection, what you observe is simply what you observe, and it is us who make assumptions based off of those observations into what we would hope to call an understanding or a model. So religious fanatics might be going "woohoo, science could be utterly wrong!", but it works both ways, your religion only has a 1 out of infinity chance of being right as well which gives everyone all the more reason to simply be open minded and not think of one's own ideas as being more or less correct than the idea of anyone else.
So, in other words, because we can't know everything, we should abandon the idea of knowing anything?
No, that sounds dumb. Indeed, every so often someone proposes exactly this, and it has never sounded smart any of the times it's been proposed.
Actually, in a way yes. You actually don't really know anything because you have no idea what other factors lie out there and therefore cannot consider all factors, there could be and nearly is an infinite complexity of factors effecting every action in the universe, to say you actually "know" anything would be incorrect. The only thing you can actually state you know is what you think you have observed, and then say that there's a pattern in similar types of observations if you happen to think you observed a pattern, nothing more. Anything beyond that is your own assumption. The only reason we say we "know" something is because it's easier than saying there's thousands upon thousands of smaller factors effecting the patterns that allow you to extrapolate only an approximate and not exact pattern which you hope will give you similar results across different experiments and never be too far off. And even at that point, all we think we observed isn't even the actual photons that bounced off of an object, it's electrical pulses that your brain alters and interprets however its setup to, the original photons were destroyed and by the time the photons even reach your eyes, the matter that those photons bounced off of has already shifted position and had fluctuations in the energy states and quantum numbers of it's constituent particles. Reality could really be anything and we'd have no idea. But, the real point is that it's not wise to think you know more than anyone else. Because of the nature of an assumption, you can be just as wrong in the presence of any new information. And then, because anything that you think you know is ultimately an assumption since all logical conclusions can be traced back to an axiom, anyone can be wrong about anything at any time, and I had a hard time accepting that after spending so much time working with the math and logic of physics and trying to asses the physical nature of what happens, but it's true, and it's why the entire scientific community changes it's entire outlook every 100 years or so.
It might sound "dumb", but what does the universe actually care what you think you know? It will still function however it functions, independent of your knowledge of it and it will never tell you if you're right or wrong (as far as we "know").
No, really, this idea is no better now than when Carneades first proposed it two and a quarter thousand years ago.
You see the problem is that even if it is impossible to, strictly speaking, be 100% certain of anything (and descarte would like a word, by the way), *behaving* as if you are completely uncertain of anything is just foolish.
Plus, even if we might never be able to be certain of anything, if we don't try and find out more we can be damn sure we never will.
No, really, this idea is no better now than when Carneades first proposed it two and a quarter thousand years ago.
You see the problem is that even if it is impossible to, strictly speaking, be 100% certain of anything (and descarte would like a word, by the way), *behaving* as if you are completely uncertain of anything is just foolish.
Plus, even if we might never be able to be certain of anything, if we don't try and find out more we can be damn sure we never will.
Well firstly, we don't actually need to pursue science or certainty, there's no one forcing us (as far as we know), and the rest of the animal and plant kingdom doesn't seem to care about them. And second, when you say certainty, what you're actually saying is still reducible to very straight forward statements of what you think you saw, and then using your personal judgement to say there's a pattern which can be reduced to axioms. "When I observe this variable increases, it appears as though this other variable decrease." Then you ask if/how those variables are connected, and you might say "If I mathematically define that variable in this manor and define the other variable in this manner (other axiom), then it appears I can create a function that will give approximations close to the values of what the relationship between the variables appears to give me", and that's fine, but then if you take the extra step to say "this variable causes the actions in that other variable", that's where the big assumption is made, so really saying you "know" something is just a way to make things easier and I guess more interesting than saying you never actually know anything anyway, you're really only perusing one possibility out of an infinite number of possibilities. And then, you find out that there were some things wrong, there's scientific error, there's no possible way you could have accounted for all factors effecting the experiment, and some other person does another experiment that has what they assume are better approximations, then they get it peer reviewed and the science community eventually looks at it, repeats the experiment, get's similar but not exact results, then the process repeats.
The problem is all we can say is that we extrapolate or assume evidence based off of patterns we think we observed. And, I wouldn't want to know everything anyway, then there would be nothing left to discover and science would be over.
And actually, can you draw me a logical correlation of statements on a flow-chart to illustrate how being uncertain = foolish? I don't recall that correlation in number theory, so good luck to you. Maybe you'll do something completely new by somehow finding a way to force subjective emotional judgement into mathematical correlations.
See, you can continue typing long paragraphs with big vocabulary words, but really what it amounts to is something you could have spared yourself the effort of writing by just typing two words: Why try?
And I would embrace this philosophy, but I can't.
Because I have testicles.
And the thing about having testicles is, when you have testicles, you realize that yes, you will not be successful at everything all of the time. Sometimes you will fail. In fact, often will you fail. That's part of how human beings learn. You will fail, and you will fail, and you will fail, and maybe, just maybe, you might fail enough so that the next time, you won't fail so hard. That's what we call a success. Thing of it is, though, no matter how many successes you have, every time you try, you will risk failing again.
But that's ok. Because as it turns out, failing is nowhere near as bad as not trying. That's called "giving up." That's when you're so afraid of failure that you abandon all hope of success. And you might try to call it wisdom, or call it a realistic outlook, or call it whatever bull**** you've cooked up for yourself, but we all know what it really is. There's a word for it. It's called "cowardice."
See, you can continue typing long paragraphs with big vocabulary words, but really what it amounts to is something you could have spared yourself the effort of writing by just typing two words: Why try?
And I would embrace this philosophy, but I can't.
Because I have testicles.
And the thing about having testicles is, when you have testicles, you realize that yes, you will not be successful at everything all of the time. Sometimes you will fail. In fact, often will you fail. That's part of how human beings learn. You will fail, and you will fail, and you will fail, and maybe, just maybe, you might fail enough so that the next time, you won't fail so hard. That's what we call a success. Thing of it is, though, no matter how many successes you have, every time you try, you will risk failing again.
But that's ok. Because as it turns out, failing is nowhere near as bad as not trying. That's called "giving up." That's when you're so afraid of failure that you abandon all hope of success. And you might try to call it wisdom, or call it a realistic outlook, or call it whatever bull**** you've cooked up for yourself, but we all know what it really is. There's a word for it. It's called "cowardice."
I do not see why you are bringing in arbitrary emotion attachments about failure, unless you are making some arcane point I am not aware of. I'm not afraid of failure, and it's why I was able to accept how my intuition was wrong according to the scientific community to have what the scientific community would call a more accurate view of the physical phenomena universe.
I do not see why you are bringing in arbitrary emotion attachments about failure
What is this thread other than your fear of being wrong?
As far as I can tell it's not about fear of anything, it's about acknowledging that you actually are not more or less correct than anyone else at a given point in time because the basis for your correctness is a few out of an infinite number of possible logical conclusions which are based off of axioms which by definition have no proof and are assumptions. If there was some way to have logical conclusions that you could use in science that was never based off of axioms, that may solve it, but the only way I can think for that to be possible is if something had an infinite number of steps drawn to it's conclusion so that you couldn't actually trace it back to a single initial axiom, which we would never be able to fully discover anyway, it would be like trying to find the last number of pi.
As far as I can tell it's not about fear of anything, it's about acknowledging that you are not more or less correct than anyone else at a given point in time
And why would we acknowledge an assertion when that assertion is obviously bogus?
As far as I can tell it's not about fear of anything, it's about acknowledging that you are not more or less correct than anyone else at a given point in time
And why would we acknowledge an assertion when that assertion is obviously bogus?
Because your personal basis for it being bogus is based off of your own arbitrary assumptions which are extrapolated from possibly logical conclusions which are based off of axioms which by definition have no proof, and if they aren't based off of logical conclusions then they are simply themselves assumptions which by their own nature inherently provide no reason for belief over any other assumption as by their definition they have no proof or even evidence of their correctness. You can trace any logical conclusion back to some kind of assumption.
As far as I can tell it's not about fear of anything, it's about acknowledging that you are not more or less correct than anyone else at a given point in time
And why would we acknowledge an assertion when that assertion is obviously bogus?
Because your personal basis for it being bogus is based off of your own arbitrary assumptions which are extrapolated from possibly logical conclusions which are based off of axioms which by definition have no proof, and if they aren't based off of logical conclusions then they are simply themselves assumptions which by their own nature inherently provide no reason for belief over any other assumption as by their definition they have no proof or even evidence of their correctness. You can trace any logical conclusion back to some kind of assumption.
Which does not make the axioms wrong.
And the logical nature of the assertions made by a person might be sound, but also might not be sound, thus leading to certain people being more correct than others.
As far as I can tell it's not about fear of anything, it's about acknowledging that you are not more or less correct than anyone else at a given point in time
And why would we acknowledge an assertion when that assertion is obviously bogus?
Because your personal basis for it being bogus is based off of your own arbitrary assumptions which are extrapolated from possibly logical conclusions which are based off of axioms which by definition have no proof, and if they aren't based off of logical conclusions then they are simply themselves assumptions which by their own nature inherently provide no reason for belief over any other assumption as by their definition they have no proof or even evidence of their correctness. You can trace any logical conclusion back to some kind of assumption.
Which does not make them wrong.
Right, but out of an infinite number of possible assumptions for what's "really" happening, it doesn't make them right, it gives them an x/infinity chance of being right on their own. It's like someone filled a basket with an infinite number of ideas, then had an infinite number of people each pick an idea. And anyway, 1/infinity = 2/infinity = 3/infinity = undefined, showing that it doesn't matter "how many" logical conclusions you have, the answer for the probability that you're ultimately correct is still the same, which of course uses axioms. No matter what, you will base something off of some kind of assumption, like I just did, and assumptions have no inherent proof.
I don't give it up, I think the realm of the science is an interesting possibility to explore and so far is more interesting than any religion I have encountered. But as I said before, but there's reasons why the entire scientific community has been wrong before and it's because of the points I made earlier. They were wrong to assume the Earth was flat, that things fell at the same rate, that the universe was deterministic, that there's an equal and opposite to every observed force, that particles were classical objects, that Schrodinger's equations were relativistic, that Einstein's field equations could completely describe gravity, that gravity was continuous, possibly that space was continuous and not quantized and possibly that information couldn't be created or destroyed. No matter what though, the most you will really ever do is infinitely approach the "right" answer, and even then it's only the answer based off the the factors you can measure to a high enough degree of certainty with your instruments. The world of science is founded merely by people, not omnipotent beings who have the power to know what's right and wrong, people just have the power to observe.
As far as I can tell it's not about fear of anything, it's about acknowledging that you are not more or less correct than anyone else at a given point in time
I'm sorry, but this is false.
Your problem is that you believe the following:
1) For any given theory A about anything, there is another theory B
2) For the theory B, there is another theory different from all described previous theories, ad infinitum
3) We have no reason to prefer any of these theories
4) therefor, any given theory only has an infinitesimal chance of being correct.
Here's where your theory is less right than other theories: Step 3 is false.
We have reasons to prefer the theory "the sun will come up in the east
tomorrow" to the theory "the sun will come up in the west tomorrow".
We have reasons to believe the sky is made of..well, air and such...as opposed to believe it is made of cheese and oscar statues.
Further, you make an unjustified assumption in step 2; For any given theory, we have no reason to believe there are infinite actual or possible opposing theories of any degree of plausibility. Because, as noted, the theory that the sky is made of cheese is one I can instantly zero rate.
And in your OWN last post you proove you do not believe your theory!
They were wrong to assume the Earth was flat, that things fell at the same rate, that the universe was deterministic, that there's an equal and opposite to every observed force, that particles were classical objects, that Schrodinger's equations were relativistic, that Einstein's field equations could completely describe gravity, that gravity was continuous, possibly that space was continuous and not quantized and possibly that information couldn't be created or destroyed.
Chenjesu, it's not about this binary, black-or-white concept of "You either know stuff or you don't know anything" that you seem to be presenting.
Apart from a famous thought of René Descartes, I do agree with you that we either know stuff or we don't know anything. However, it is highly inadvisable to just throw up your hands at this point and give up since you can't really know much of anything.
The focus should be on finding increasingly reliable means of predicting what will happen in the future. Suppose you are standing in the middle of a street and observe a semi truck hurtling down the road towards you. Compare the following two approaches:
"I can't know what that semi truck is going to do. It may suddenly swerve off the side of the road, it may explode in a ball of fire, it may deploy wings and rockets and fly into the air, it may stay on course, or it may turn into a frog and hop away. I don't know what it will do, so I shall assume nothing about it."
vs.
"Vehicles typically maintain their present form and direction of travel. I should move out of the way right now."
The second one doesn't claim to know anything, but it uses observed patterns to make an educated guess about the future. No futures are known with regards to the looming semi, but that doesn't mean all futures are equiprobable.
Science, I would say, is humanity's way of probing our limits of pattern-finding and future-prediction. Of course science doesn't predict things with 100.0% certainty. However predicting things correctly 99.7% of the time is a very useful ability to have. Heck, predicting things correctly even 55% of the time can be more useful than pure chance.
And animals do this too, by the way. They use observation and memory to learn what it's a good idea to do and what it's not a good idea to do. For example: "During time (of day or year) T, I found prey/food in Location X. I should try Location X again when I'm hungry." And if the animal observes a pattern of prey/food only really being there during Time T, guess what? The animal usually only checks out Location X during Time T. I doesn't know it will find food then and there, but it's worked well so far and it is advisable to follow the observed pattern.
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"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." --Carl Sagan
See, you can continue typing long paragraphs with big vocabulary words, but really what it amounts to is something you could have spared yourself the effort of writing by just typing two words: Why try?
And I would embrace this philosophy, but I can't.
Because I have testicles.
And the thing about having testicles is, when you have testicles, you realize that yes, you will not be successful at everything all of the time. Sometimes you will fail. In fact, often will you fail. That's part of how human beings learn. You will fail, and you will fail, and you will fail, and maybe, just maybe, you might fail enough so that the next time, you won't fail so hard. That's what we call a success. Thing of it is, though, no matter how many successes you have, every time you try, you will risk failing again.
Are you actually trying to imply something about people without testicles here, or do people with female gentalia and intersexed people come to this understanding through a different body part?
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I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
We have reasons to prefer the theory "the sun will come up in the east
tomorrow" to the theory "the sun will come up in the west tomorrow".
We have reasons to believe the sky is made of..well, air and such...as opposed to believe it is made of cheese and oscar statues.
But the extrapolation that something is more correct with evidence is still just an assumption. Really, all we can state is what we think we observe. There is no way to know for sure how the variables are connected, the knowledge of how they are connected is something we assume to be true. The sun could rise from any direction tomorrow because there could have been a black hole heading towards the solar system that at a certain proximity will cause the sun to move in a different relative direction. All we can state is "we have observed the sun rising from the east". Saying "therefore it will rise from the east tomorrow" is the assumption, so many events could happen to make that assumption false.
Further, you make an unjustified assumption in step 2; For any given theory, we have no reason to believe there are infinite actual or possible opposing theories of any degree of plausibility. Because, as noted, the theory that the sky is made of cheese is one I can instantly zero rate.
I never said they had to be opposing, but because there is no known force limiting the possible amount of theories that can exist, you have no evidence to pin-point it to a specific number.
And in your OWN last post you proove you do not believe your theory!
I didn't prove I don't believe it I simply stated it has the same probability of being correct as any other logical conclusion. If we assume the theory is false, then we are still left with the fact that every logical conclusion is based off of some kind of axiom. If you can find a conclusion with a self-proving axiom, you have a shot, but as I said, a conclusion that isn't based off of an axiom would have an infinite number of steps and so we would never be able to completely deduce it anyway.
They were wrong to assume the Earth was flat, that things fell at the same rate, that the universe was deterministic, that there's an equal and opposite to every observed force, that particles were classical objects, that Schrodinger's equations were relativistic, that Einstein's field equations could completely describe gravity, that gravity was continuous, possibly that space was continuous and not quantized and possibly that information couldn't be created or destroyed.
They were wrong, huh?
Sooooooo....how do you *know* that?
I personally don't, but the scientific community itself says it was wrong all those times, and that's because there's always factors we can't account for, and that any extrapolation we make is still an assumption.
We have reasons to prefer the theory "the sun will come up in the east
tomorrow" to the theory "the sun will come up in the west tomorrow".
We have reasons to believe the sky is made of..well, air and such...as opposed to believe it is made of cheese and oscar statues.
But the extrapolation that something is more correct with evidence is still just an assumption. Really, all we can state is what we think we observe. There is no way to know for sure how the variables are connected, the knowledge of how they are connected is something we assume to be true. The sun could rise from any direction tomorrow because there could have been a black hole heading towards the solar system that at a certain proximity will cause the sun to move in a different relative direction. All we can state is "we have observed the sun rising from the east". Saying "therefore it will rise from the east tomorrow" is the assumption, so many events could happen to make that assumption false.
Uhhhmmm....nope. Also, just so you know, the "sun rising in the east" thing -it's not the sun moving, it's the earth rotating. Also that isn't how black holes work, just so you know.
Also, in terms of things we know: We know the sun rose in the east today.
Further, you make an unjustified assumption in step 2; For any given theory, we have no reason to believe there are infinite actual or possible opposing theories of any degree of plausibility. Because, as noted, the theory that the sky is made of cheese is one I can instantly zero rate.
I never said they had to be opposing, but because there is no known force limiting the possible amount of theories that can exist, you have no evidence to pin-point it to a specific number.
If they're complimantary theories, then they don't impact our knowledge at all.
And there doesn't have to be a "force" limiting the number of theories on a specific subject. Lets take gravity; name 20 theories.
And in your OWN last post you proove you do not believe your theory!
I didn't prove I don't believe it I simply stated it has the same probability of being correct as any other logical conclusion. If we assume the theory is false, then we are still left with the fact that every logical conclusion is based off of some kind of axiom. If you can find a conclusion with a self-proving axiom, you have a shot, but as I said, a conclusion that isn't based off of an axiom would have an infinite number of steps and so we would never be able to completely deduce it anyway.
I personally don't, but the scientific community itself says it was wrong all those times, and that's because there's always factors we can't account for, and that any extrapolation we make is still an assumption.
No. Just no. Just because someone was wrong once (or several times) doesn't make them always wrong.
Further, your theory is, as mentioned, useless even if it were correct. What is the value in behaving as if we can never know anything?
Uhhhmmm....nope. Also, just so you know, the "sun rising in the east" thing -it's not the sun moving, it's the earth rotating. Also that isn't how black holes work, just so you know.
Also, in terms of things we know: We know the sun rose in the east today.
The position of the sun matters, if it moves, it's change in gravity over space will effect Earth's orbit which could effect the Earth's tilt. Also from out relative perspective of the Earth, that's exactly how it works, we are assuming the relative frame of reference of an observe on Earth, not of the sun. We don't know that we are rotating, from our frame of reference everything is normal and it is everything else that appears to be rotating, so it is still logical to mark the sun as having a changing position from the frame of reference of an observer on Earth. It is an accelerated frame of reference which makes it a fictitious force, but you can still extrapolate a good approximate orbit from that fictitious force just as you can figure out the centripetal acceleration from the "force" that's "pushing" you to the left of the car when you make a right turn.
And there doesn't have to be a "force" limiting the number of theories on a specific subject. Lets take gravity; name 20 theories.
If you want I can create 20 hypotheses off the top of my head and I don't see anything limiting any other average person from doing that either. Otherwise there was Newton's version of gravity which stated that a man pulls on the Earth with the same amount of force that the Earth pulls on a man, there was the theory of aether, there's relativistic field equations from people like Einstein and Lorentz, there' super-string membranes that comprise all the forces of nature in super-string theory, there's Higg's particles in contemporary quantum field theory, and an even newer theory that treats space as compositions of quantized manifolds.
No. Just no. Just because someone was wrong once (or several times) doesn't make them always wrong.
It doesn't seem like you've done a lot of reading. I never said I knew they were wrong, I said that they said they said they were wrong, and furthermore I can't find anywhere in my posts where I stated or implied that because someone was wrong once means they are always wrong, I'm stating that for any assumption, which includes all axioms, and there is inherently no proof in an assumption so there is in fact at least some chance that any assumption you make can be wrong, which includes any logical conclusion you extrapolate. It seems like you're attached to the idea that science = law of the universe, which even real scientists know isn't correct. Science is our observations, and then extrapolations and assumptions we make from those observations that are testable and repeatable.
Further, your theory is, as mentioned, useless even if it were correct. What is the value in behaving as if we can never know anything?
What's the ultimate value of trying to know stuff anyway? People merely get into science because it's interesting or because they are good at it and can make a living off of it.
"We can't know anything, therefore nothing" while a belief you may hold, is not really something that can be debated.
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Sing lustily and with good courage.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
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because we cannot account for all information and there is no evidence that we ever will,
because there are an infinite "amount" (technically infinity can't be an amount or value, but you get what I'm saying) of possible out-comes, variables and ideas,
because all logical conclusions can eventually be reduced to an axiom,
that the following conclusion applies: there is a 1 out of infinity chance of being 100% right about any conclusion you make, and thus there is no reason to 100% believe any particular idea or religion or philosophy.
paradox: this entire conclusion could be wrong by it's own parameters, but a possible resolution that we would merely regress to a previous state of being anyway where we already no one had any evidence to confirm any conclusion 100%, there is still no way to prove anything 100% anyway. No matter what you think you know, there could always be information you don't know about that makes your conclusion not true. But I guess it would be a bit like saying "This statement could be false".
So, just be open minded about other ideas, because even if you think an invisible purple intangible unicorn is crazy, you could be surprised one day. Maybe there's a few extra spacial dimensions we don't know about.
"what about all the science we've done"? Well it's funny you should say that because I've been working with science for a long time, and if there's one thing that sticks out, it's that the entire perspective of the scientific community keeps changing. Remember how the Earth was flat and everything fell at the same rate? Well Aristotle was wrong and Newton had better approximations to described what he saw. You know those "laws" of motion? They're wrong, Newton was utterly wrong (except for technically calculus), and it turned out Einstein had better approximations. Then, it turns out Einstein wasn't 100% correct and now using the information of Enrico Fermi, Feynman, Planck and Debroglie and Schrodinger and ect, we keep coming up with newer and newer models to better approximate our observations, because science is only based on what we observe, not on an arbitrary assumption of correctness, and so we can never say that what we observe is "correct", there's no connection, what you observe is simply what you observe, and it is us who make assumptions based off of those observations into what we would hope to call an understanding or a model. So religious fanatics might be going "woohoo, science could be utterly wrong!", but it works both ways, your religion only has a 1 out of infinity chance of being right as well which gives everyone all the more reason to simply be open minded and not think of one's own ideas as being more or less correct than the idea of anyone else.
No, that sounds dumb. Indeed, every so often someone proposes exactly this, and it has never sounded smart any of the times it's been proposed.
Actually, in a way yes. You actually don't really know anything because you have no idea what other factors lie out there and therefore cannot consider all factors, there could be and nearly is an infinite complexity of factors effecting every action in the universe, to say you actually "know" anything would be incorrect. The only thing you can actually state you know is what you think you have observed, and then say that there's a pattern in similar types of observations if you happen to think you observed a pattern, nothing more. Anything beyond that is your own assumption. The only reason we say we "know" something is because it's easier than saying there's thousands upon thousands of smaller factors effecting the patterns that allow you to extrapolate only an approximate and not exact pattern which you hope will give you similar results across different experiments and never be too far off. And even at that point, all we think we observed isn't even the actual photons that bounced off of an object, it's electrical pulses that your brain alters and interprets however its setup to, the original photons were destroyed and by the time the photons even reach your eyes, the matter that those photons bounced off of has already shifted position and had fluctuations in the energy states and quantum numbers of it's constituent particles. Reality could really be anything and we'd have no idea. But, the real point is that it's not wise to think you know more than anyone else. Because of the nature of an assumption, you can be just as wrong in the presence of any new information. And then, because anything that you think you know is ultimately an assumption since all logical conclusions can be traced back to an axiom, anyone can be wrong about anything at any time, and I had a hard time accepting that after spending so much time working with the math and logic of physics and trying to asses the physical nature of what happens, but it's true, and it's why the entire scientific community changes it's entire outlook every 100 years or so.
It might sound "dumb", but what does the universe actually care what you think you know? It will still function however it functions, independent of your knowledge of it and it will never tell you if you're right or wrong (as far as we "know").
You see the problem is that even if it is impossible to, strictly speaking, be 100% certain of anything (and descarte would like a word, by the way), *behaving* as if you are completely uncertain of anything is just foolish.
Plus, even if we might never be able to be certain of anything, if we don't try and find out more we can be damn sure we never will.
Well firstly, we don't actually need to pursue science or certainty, there's no one forcing us (as far as we know), and the rest of the animal and plant kingdom doesn't seem to care about them. And second, when you say certainty, what you're actually saying is still reducible to very straight forward statements of what you think you saw, and then using your personal judgement to say there's a pattern which can be reduced to axioms. "When I observe this variable increases, it appears as though this other variable decrease." Then you ask if/how those variables are connected, and you might say "If I mathematically define that variable in this manor and define the other variable in this manner (other axiom), then it appears I can create a function that will give approximations close to the values of what the relationship between the variables appears to give me", and that's fine, but then if you take the extra step to say "this variable causes the actions in that other variable", that's where the big assumption is made, so really saying you "know" something is just a way to make things easier and I guess more interesting than saying you never actually know anything anyway, you're really only perusing one possibility out of an infinite number of possibilities. And then, you find out that there were some things wrong, there's scientific error, there's no possible way you could have accounted for all factors effecting the experiment, and some other person does another experiment that has what they assume are better approximations, then they get it peer reviewed and the science community eventually looks at it, repeats the experiment, get's similar but not exact results, then the process repeats.
The problem is all we can say is that we extrapolate or assume evidence based off of patterns we think we observed. And, I wouldn't want to know everything anyway, then there would be nothing left to discover and science would be over.
And actually, can you draw me a logical correlation of statements on a flow-chart to illustrate how being uncertain = foolish? I don't recall that correlation in number theory, so good luck to you. Maybe you'll do something completely new by somehow finding a way to force subjective emotional judgement into mathematical correlations.
And I would embrace this philosophy, but I can't.
Because I have testicles.
And the thing about having testicles is, when you have testicles, you realize that yes, you will not be successful at everything all of the time. Sometimes you will fail. In fact, often will you fail. That's part of how human beings learn. You will fail, and you will fail, and you will fail, and maybe, just maybe, you might fail enough so that the next time, you won't fail so hard. That's what we call a success. Thing of it is, though, no matter how many successes you have, every time you try, you will risk failing again.
But that's ok. Because as it turns out, failing is nowhere near as bad as not trying. That's called "giving up." That's when you're so afraid of failure that you abandon all hope of success. And you might try to call it wisdom, or call it a realistic outlook, or call it whatever bull**** you've cooked up for yourself, but we all know what it really is. There's a word for it. It's called "cowardice."
I do not see why you are bringing in arbitrary emotion attachments about failure, unless you are making some arcane point I am not aware of. I'm not afraid of failure, and it's why I was able to accept how my intuition was wrong according to the scientific community to have what the scientific community would call a more accurate view of the physical phenomena universe.
What is this thread other than your fear of being wrong?
As far as I can tell it's not about fear of anything, it's about acknowledging that you actually are not more or less correct than anyone else at a given point in time because the basis for your correctness is a few out of an infinite number of possible logical conclusions which are based off of axioms which by definition have no proof and are assumptions. If there was some way to have logical conclusions that you could use in science that was never based off of axioms, that may solve it, but the only way I can think for that to be possible is if something had an infinite number of steps drawn to it's conclusion so that you couldn't actually trace it back to a single initial axiom, which we would never be able to fully discover anyway, it would be like trying to find the last number of pi.
And why would we acknowledge an assertion when that assertion is obviously bogus?
Because your personal basis for it being bogus is based off of your own arbitrary assumptions which are extrapolated from possibly logical conclusions which are based off of axioms which by definition have no proof, and if they aren't based off of logical conclusions then they are simply themselves assumptions which by their own nature inherently provide no reason for belief over any other assumption as by their definition they have no proof or even evidence of their correctness. You can trace any logical conclusion back to some kind of assumption.
Which does not make the axioms wrong.
And the logical nature of the assertions made by a person might be sound, but also might not be sound, thus leading to certain people being more correct than others.
Right, but out of an infinite number of possible assumptions for what's "really" happening, it doesn't make them right, it gives them an x/infinity chance of being right on their own. It's like someone filled a basket with an infinite number of ideas, then had an infinite number of people each pick an idea. And anyway, 1/infinity = 2/infinity = 3/infinity = undefined, showing that it doesn't matter "how many" logical conclusions you have, the answer for the probability that you're ultimately correct is still the same, which of course uses axioms. No matter what, you will base something off of some kind of assumption, like I just did, and assumptions have no inherent proof.
You give up on the pursuit of human knowledge.
We're going to go off and enjoy it.
Boy, I guess you really showed us, huh?
I don't give it up, I think the realm of the science is an interesting possibility to explore and so far is more interesting than any religion I have encountered. But as I said before, but there's reasons why the entire scientific community has been wrong before and it's because of the points I made earlier. They were wrong to assume the Earth was flat, that things fell at the same rate, that the universe was deterministic, that there's an equal and opposite to every observed force, that particles were classical objects, that Schrodinger's equations were relativistic, that Einstein's field equations could completely describe gravity, that gravity was continuous, possibly that space was continuous and not quantized and possibly that information couldn't be created or destroyed. No matter what though, the most you will really ever do is infinitely approach the "right" answer, and even then it's only the answer based off the the factors you can measure to a high enough degree of certainty with your instruments. The world of science is founded merely by people, not omnipotent beings who have the power to know what's right and wrong, people just have the power to observe.
I'm sorry, but this is false.
Your problem is that you believe the following:
1) For any given theory A about anything, there is another theory B
2) For the theory B, there is another theory different from all described previous theories, ad infinitum
3) We have no reason to prefer any of these theories
4) therefor, any given theory only has an infinitesimal chance of being correct.
Here's where your theory is less right than other theories: Step 3 is false.
We have reasons to prefer the theory "the sun will come up in the east
tomorrow" to the theory "the sun will come up in the west tomorrow".
We have reasons to believe the sky is made of..well, air and such...as opposed to believe it is made of cheese and oscar statues.
Further, you make an unjustified assumption in step 2; For any given theory, we have no reason to believe there are infinite actual or possible opposing theories of any degree of plausibility. Because, as noted, the theory that the sky is made of cheese is one I can instantly zero rate.
And in your OWN last post you proove you do not believe your theory!
They were wrong, huh?
Sooooooo....how do you *know* that?
Apart from a famous thought of René Descartes, I do agree with you that we either know stuff or we don't know anything. However, it is highly inadvisable to just throw up your hands at this point and give up since you can't really know much of anything.
The focus should be on finding increasingly reliable means of predicting what will happen in the future. Suppose you are standing in the middle of a street and observe a semi truck hurtling down the road towards you. Compare the following two approaches:
"I can't know what that semi truck is going to do. It may suddenly swerve off the side of the road, it may explode in a ball of fire, it may deploy wings and rockets and fly into the air, it may stay on course, or it may turn into a frog and hop away. I don't know what it will do, so I shall assume nothing about it."
vs.
"Vehicles typically maintain their present form and direction of travel. I should move out of the way right now."
The second one doesn't claim to know anything, but it uses observed patterns to make an educated guess about the future. No futures are known with regards to the looming semi, but that doesn't mean all futures are equiprobable.
Science, I would say, is humanity's way of probing our limits of pattern-finding and future-prediction. Of course science doesn't predict things with 100.0% certainty. However predicting things correctly 99.7% of the time is a very useful ability to have. Heck, predicting things correctly even 55% of the time can be more useful than pure chance.
And animals do this too, by the way. They use observation and memory to learn what it's a good idea to do and what it's not a good idea to do. For example: "During time (of day or year) T, I found prey/food in Location X. I should try Location X again when I'm hungry." And if the animal observes a pattern of prey/food only really being there during Time T, guess what? The animal usually only checks out Location X during Time T. I doesn't know it will find food then and there, but it's worked well so far and it is advisable to follow the observed pattern.
Are you actually trying to imply something about people without testicles here, or do people with female gentalia and intersexed people come to this understanding through a different body part?
But the extrapolation that something is more correct with evidence is still just an assumption. Really, all we can state is what we think we observe. There is no way to know for sure how the variables are connected, the knowledge of how they are connected is something we assume to be true. The sun could rise from any direction tomorrow because there could have been a black hole heading towards the solar system that at a certain proximity will cause the sun to move in a different relative direction. All we can state is "we have observed the sun rising from the east". Saying "therefore it will rise from the east tomorrow" is the assumption, so many events could happen to make that assumption false.
I never said they had to be opposing, but because there is no known force limiting the possible amount of theories that can exist, you have no evidence to pin-point it to a specific number.
I didn't prove I don't believe it I simply stated it has the same probability of being correct as any other logical conclusion. If we assume the theory is false, then we are still left with the fact that every logical conclusion is based off of some kind of axiom. If you can find a conclusion with a self-proving axiom, you have a shot, but as I said, a conclusion that isn't based off of an axiom would have an infinite number of steps and so we would never be able to completely deduce it anyway.
I personally don't, but the scientific community itself says it was wrong all those times, and that's because there's always factors we can't account for, and that any extrapolation we make is still an assumption.
Uhhhmmm....nope. Also, just so you know, the "sun rising in the east" thing -it's not the sun moving, it's the earth rotating. Also that isn't how black holes work, just so you know.
Also, in terms of things we know: We know the sun rose in the east today.
If they're complimantary theories, then they don't impact our knowledge at all.
And there doesn't have to be a "force" limiting the number of theories on a specific subject. Lets take gravity; name 20 theories.
I didn't prove I don't believe it I simply stated it has the same probability of being correct as any other logical conclusion. If we assume the theory is false, then we are still left with the fact that every logical conclusion is based off of some kind of axiom. If you can find a conclusion with a self-proving axiom, you have a shot, but as I said, a conclusion that isn't based off of an axiom would have an infinite number of steps and so we would never be able to completely deduce it anyway.
No. Just no. Just because someone was wrong once (or several times) doesn't make them always wrong.
Further, your theory is, as mentioned, useless even if it were correct. What is the value in behaving as if we can never know anything?
The position of the sun matters, if it moves, it's change in gravity over space will effect Earth's orbit which could effect the Earth's tilt. Also from out relative perspective of the Earth, that's exactly how it works, we are assuming the relative frame of reference of an observe on Earth, not of the sun. We don't know that we are rotating, from our frame of reference everything is normal and it is everything else that appears to be rotating, so it is still logical to mark the sun as having a changing position from the frame of reference of an observer on Earth. It is an accelerated frame of reference which makes it a fictitious force, but you can still extrapolate a good approximate orbit from that fictitious force just as you can figure out the centripetal acceleration from the "force" that's "pushing" you to the left of the car when you make a right turn.
Theories on their own don't impact knowledge anyway, it is out assumption that they are correct that allows us to mark that as being knowledge.
If you want I can create 20 hypotheses off the top of my head and I don't see anything limiting any other average person from doing that either. Otherwise there was Newton's version of gravity which stated that a man pulls on the Earth with the same amount of force that the Earth pulls on a man, there was the theory of aether, there's relativistic field equations from people like Einstein and Lorentz, there' super-string membranes that comprise all the forces of nature in super-string theory, there's Higg's particles in contemporary quantum field theory, and an even newer theory that treats space as compositions of quantized manifolds.
It doesn't seem like you've done a lot of reading. I never said I knew they were wrong, I said that they said they said they were wrong, and furthermore I can't find anywhere in my posts where I stated or implied that because someone was wrong once means they are always wrong, I'm stating that for any assumption, which includes all axioms, and there is inherently no proof in an assumption so there is in fact at least some chance that any assumption you make can be wrong, which includes any logical conclusion you extrapolate. It seems like you're attached to the idea that science = law of the universe, which even real scientists know isn't correct. Science is our observations, and then extrapolations and assumptions we make from those observations that are testable and repeatable.
What's the ultimate value of trying to know stuff anyway? People merely get into science because it's interesting or because they are good at it and can make a living off of it.
Go jump off a building.
Why wont you?
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.