That basic assumption of science, as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, is our default view of the world, based on our experiences from the moment we're born. Any other assumption, such as the non-observability or non-causality, is an extraordinary claim which needs to be backed up by some pretty solid evidence -- something which philosophers and other mystics are notoriously unwilling to provide.
Doctoral degrees carry the title "PhD" as a result of a historical artifact. That's all. "Bachelor" and "Master" are equally artifactual.
If you define all human thought as philosophy, then the word is so broad as to be meaningless. What do you call that field which is practiced by the people we generally call "philosophers?"
No, science starts with the acceptance of the scientific method as a way to determine the "truth".
When you say "the scientific method," you're sweeping under the rug a whole collection of methods, all of which have been tested and modified for centuries, many of which have been discarded along the way when something better comes along, and which vary greatly from field to field. IOW, there is no "scientific method" -- there is a collection of methods generally agreed upon by scientists as the result of long experience.
It presupposes the accuracy of our senses, the non-arbitrariness of the universe, and even the notion that there is an external universe to study at all.
As I replied to another poster in the thread, this is the default assumption based on our experiences from infancy, and there is no reason to assume otherwise. Mystics love trying to poke holes in our perceptions of reality, but they do so without offering any evidence for their claims.
While many philosophic systems rest on axioms, those axioms are not arbitrary. They are invented, or discovered, because they logically explain the experiences of the philosopher.
Ah, but (good) scientific hypotheses logically explain the experiences of everybody, that's the difference. Philosophers' axioms may make sense to them and to people who think like them, but they fail in general applicability.
Philosophers use the scientific method to determine the axioms which underlie their systems.
Please, tell us about the methods of the science done by Aristotle, or Augustine, or Wittgenstein!
Without philosophy, there would be no way to argue that the scientific method was valid at all.
Only if you define "philosophy" so broadly that the word loses any meaning. In the real world, the best argument for science is that it works; it produces useful results. Philosophy has never cured a disease, or built a computer, or shown us anything in the universe beyond what we can see with the naked eye. Science has done all of these things and more, and will continue to do so.
The philosophy of science, when done right, is about two things: first, learning the rules of logic (a subject which unfortunately is not generally taught below the college level) and how they can be applied to science, and second, discussion of the ethical dilemmas which scientists may face and how to resolve them. These are very different from what might be called the "philosophical worldview" in which one starts with unalterable axioms, not subject to modification based on observation, and attempts to reason from there about the workings of the natural world.
Science starts with the proposition that the Universe is rational and can be observed in a rational and repeatable manner.
This is not so much a "proposition" as it is the baseline, default, common-sense observation based on our own experiences. I pick up the rock, I drop it, the rock falls to the ground. I pick it up and drop it again, and again it falls to the ground. Etc. We learn this from infancy, long before either "science" or "philosophy" enter our heads. Everything else -- all the layers of mysticism which philosophers and theologians have over the millennia attached to our perceptions of reality, and all the hypotheses which scientists have floated over the last few centuries -- falls into the category of "propositions in need of testing, otherwise worthless." But the fundamental difference between science and philosophy is that scientists' propositions can be and are tested, and discarded if found wanting, while philosophers' remain no matter how little use they may be in describing the real world.
Pretty much every bit of physics news inevitably seems to attract mystics. Look, the ancient Hindu philosophers weren't scientists. Neither were the ancient Greek philosophers, or the ancient Chinese philosophers, or the ancient Hebrew philosophers, or... None of them was observing the universe around them in any systematic way. They were pretty much all sitting around staring at the insides of their own skulls. Any ideas they had that superfically appear to foreshadow some development in modern science were a matter of blind luck.
But generally speaking, how confident are we (read: Science) that we are actually describing the way the universe truly works, i.e., that we are not simply playing tremendously sophisticated math games?
It's not a dumb question at all, and it's one that scientists in all fields ask themselves often. IANAP, but my field, bioinformatics, is one that is also often accused of "playing math games" without producing testable hypotheses as well, so I'll take a stab at the answer:
We're as confident as we can be given the knowledge we have, no less and no more, but it will always take time to build up confidence in today's leading-edge research, and a lot of it will inevitably be discarded along the way. The only way to judge good science is, ultimately, how well it lasts. WRT physics, we know that Newtonian physics has stood the test of centuries -- we also know that it's wrong in some very important ways, but it's right enough to describe the everyday world we live in to a high level of precision. Einsteinian physics, a hundred years old at this point, is a better approximation, and it describes many extreme conditions in the universe (high speeds, large masses, and huge distances) quite well. Quantum physics, just a little younger, does a good job at the other extreme. These three paradigms put together (often with some effort) and applied to engineering problems form the basis of pretty much our entire technological world. They're all approximations, but if the approximations are good enough, that doesn't matter.
As for string theory, holographic universe, etc. -- who knows? As again in fifty or a hundred years.
If you can't tie them together, you've missed something.
What you're missing is the fundamental difference between philosophy and science (including physics.) Philosophy starts with axioms. Science starts with observations. From there on out, the logical reasoning processes of philosophers and scientists are very similar, but the fact that axioms are not subject to modification based on observation makes the results of the fields entirely different.
Now if only these companies would start offering bonuses for finding prior art that invalidated competitors' patents, maybe we'd see an end to some of the patent insanity.
Good thing we have folks like you around to figure this stuff out. Otherwise we might be duped into thinking that professional astronomers with degrees in the field and years of research experience under their belts might actually know something. Tell you what, you'd better send an e-mail to NASA right away informing them of your oh-so-informed conclusion. Let us know how that works out for you, okay?
This joke and others like it would be a lot funnier if not for the fact that methane is odorless. It's not the methane you smell in farts, it's all the other stuff the gas picks up on its passage through, well, a tube full of shit.
Which they did, basically, by brute force, metal bashing, and rule of thumb. And killed a hell of a lot of people doing it. I'm a big fan of Soviet-era space technology, actually -- the stuff that has lasted is cheap and reliable -- but the process of developing it was something that would have been completely unacceptable to Americans, and rightly so.
True. Of course, the control station is also announcing its presence rather loudly... the people we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan don't have the tech to take advantage of this, of course, but it would be a grave mistake to assume that our future enemies will be fighting with such a handicap.
Winning a war will, as always, be a combination of many factors. Economic power is only one of these; no doubt it will continue to be an important one.
As far as the specific issue of producing leading-edge UAVs goes, the USSR was not particularly good at either software or electrical engineering, IIRC. Command economies and totalitarian ideologies seem to be good at the brute-force, metal-bashing, rule-of-thumb kind of engineering, but not stuff requiring higher levels of precision. To the degree that the PRC is catching up, they're doing so by becoming steadily less "communist" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Let me get this straight: you let the opinions of the type of people who post semiliterate anonymous screeds on Slashdot dictate when, where, and how you use a useful piece of equipment? Wow.
I hate to say this, but Firewire's dead. Apple invented it and they've been the main ones pushing it; now that they're pretty clearly planning to get rid of it, there are no major industry players with an interest in its survival. I agree that it's a far superior standard for pushing any meaningful amount of data around, so I'm not at all happy about this state of affairs, but so it goes.
Yeah, I've noticed that those of us who were actually in the military don't generally throw around acronyms like that at the drop of a hat. It's the Tom-Clancy-reading, FPS-playing, mil-porn 101st Fighting Keyboarders who never had the guts to get their hands dirty themselves trying to make themselves sound (they think) all tough and macho who have popularized the term.
It's my understanding that it's the abbreviation the Secret Service uses, which is fine; government agencies are famous for their love of alphabet soup. Then it was picked up by the 101st Fighting Keyboarders military-porn crowd, who love using acronyms like that because it makes them feel tough and macho, and spread from there.
The President is a manager, not a monarch. I'd argue that the nigh-royal treatment whoever is currently occupying the White House receives has a been a big part of the rise of the "Imperial Presidency" -- the isolation of the President from public opinion, the autocratic decisions without regard to the law, etc. I'm not saying he should live rough, but neither should we have to cradle him in luxury that Louis XIV would have envied.
Slashdot Mirror
That basic assumption of science, as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, is our default view of the world, based on our experiences from the moment we're born. Any other assumption, such as the non-observability or non-causality, is an extraordinary claim which needs to be backed up by some pretty solid evidence -- something which philosophers and other mystics are notoriously unwilling to provide.
Doctoral degrees carry the title "PhD" as a result of a historical artifact. That's all. "Bachelor" and "Master" are equally artifactual.
If you define all human thought as philosophy, then the word is so broad as to be meaningless. What do you call that field which is practiced by the people we generally call "philosophers?"
No, science starts with the acceptance of the scientific method as a way to determine the "truth".
When you say "the scientific method," you're sweeping under the rug a whole collection of methods, all of which have been tested and modified for centuries, many of which have been discarded along the way when something better comes along, and which vary greatly from field to field. IOW, there is no "scientific method" -- there is a collection of methods generally agreed upon by scientists as the result of long experience.
It presupposes the accuracy of our senses, the non-arbitrariness of the universe, and even the notion that there is an external universe to study at all.
As I replied to another poster in the thread, this is the default assumption based on our experiences from infancy, and there is no reason to assume otherwise. Mystics love trying to poke holes in our perceptions of reality, but they do so without offering any evidence for their claims.
While many philosophic systems rest on axioms, those axioms are not arbitrary. They are invented, or discovered, because they logically explain the experiences of the philosopher.
Ah, but (good) scientific hypotheses logically explain the experiences of everybody, that's the difference. Philosophers' axioms may make sense to them and to people who think like them, but they fail in general applicability.
Philosophers use the scientific method to determine the axioms which underlie their systems.
Please, tell us about the methods of the science done by Aristotle, or Augustine, or Wittgenstein!
Without philosophy, there would be no way to argue that the scientific method was valid at all.
Only if you define "philosophy" so broadly that the word loses any meaning. In the real world, the best argument for science is that it works; it produces useful results. Philosophy has never cured a disease, or built a computer, or shown us anything in the universe beyond what we can see with the naked eye. Science has done all of these things and more, and will continue to do so.
The philosophy of science, when done right, is about two things: first, learning the rules of logic (a subject which unfortunately is not generally taught below the college level) and how they can be applied to science, and second, discussion of the ethical dilemmas which scientists may face and how to resolve them. These are very different from what might be called the "philosophical worldview" in which one starts with unalterable axioms, not subject to modification based on observation, and attempts to reason from there about the workings of the natural world.
Science starts with the proposition that the Universe is rational and can be observed in a rational and repeatable manner.
This is not so much a "proposition" as it is the baseline, default, common-sense observation based on our own experiences. I pick up the rock, I drop it, the rock falls to the ground. I pick it up and drop it again, and again it falls to the ground. Etc. We learn this from infancy, long before either "science" or "philosophy" enter our heads. Everything else -- all the layers of mysticism which philosophers and theologians have over the millennia attached to our perceptions of reality, and all the hypotheses which scientists have floated over the last few centuries -- falls into the category of "propositions in need of testing, otherwise worthless." But the fundamental difference between science and philosophy is that scientists' propositions can be and are tested, and discarded if found wanting, while philosophers' remain no matter how little use they may be in describing the real world.
Pretty much every bit of physics news inevitably seems to attract mystics. Look, the ancient Hindu philosophers weren't scientists. Neither were the ancient Greek philosophers, or the ancient Chinese philosophers, or the ancient Hebrew philosophers, or ... None of them was observing the universe around them in any systematic way. They were pretty much all sitting around staring at the insides of their own skulls. Any ideas they had that superfically appear to foreshadow some development in modern science were a matter of blind luck.
But generally speaking, how confident are we (read: Science) that we are actually describing the way the universe truly works, i.e., that we are not simply playing tremendously sophisticated math games?
It's not a dumb question at all, and it's one that scientists in all fields ask themselves often. IANAP, but my field, bioinformatics, is one that is also often accused of "playing math games" without producing testable hypotheses as well, so I'll take a stab at the answer:
We're as confident as we can be given the knowledge we have, no less and no more, but it will always take time to build up confidence in today's leading-edge research, and a lot of it will inevitably be discarded along the way. The only way to judge good science is, ultimately, how well it lasts. WRT physics, we know that Newtonian physics has stood the test of centuries -- we also know that it's wrong in some very important ways, but it's right enough to describe the everyday world we live in to a high level of precision. Einsteinian physics, a hundred years old at this point, is a better approximation, and it describes many extreme conditions in the universe (high speeds, large masses, and huge distances) quite well. Quantum physics, just a little younger, does a good job at the other extreme. These three paradigms put together (often with some effort) and applied to engineering problems form the basis of pretty much our entire technological world. They're all approximations, but if the approximations are good enough, that doesn't matter.
As for string theory, holographic universe, etc. -- who knows? As again in fifty or a hundred years.
Physics is a subset of philosophy.
No, it's really not.
If you can't tie them together, you've missed something.
What you're missing is the fundamental difference between philosophy and science (including physics.) Philosophy starts with axioms. Science starts with observations. From there on out, the logical reasoning processes of philosophers and scientists are very similar, but the fact that axioms are not subject to modification based on observation makes the results of the fields entirely different.
Now if only these companies would start offering bonuses for finding prior art that invalidated competitors' patents, maybe we'd see an end to some of the patent insanity.
You're probably wasting your time. Posts like GPP's show a preconceived political agenda with no willingness to consider the actual facts.
But then, I'm a software engineer, not a geologist.
So maybe before posting on this subject you should, you know, learn some geology?
It is obviously a geologic process
Good thing we have folks like you around to figure this stuff out. Otherwise we might be duped into thinking that professional astronomers with degrees in the field and years of research experience under their belts might actually know something. Tell you what, you'd better send an e-mail to NASA right away informing them of your oh-so-informed conclusion. Let us know how that works out for you, okay?
Exactly!
This joke and others like it would be a lot funnier if not for the fact that methane is odorless. It's not the methane you smell in farts, it's all the other stuff the gas picks up on its passage through, well, a tube full of shit.
Like say launching rockets into orbit.
Which they did, basically, by brute force, metal bashing, and rule of thumb. And killed a hell of a lot of people doing it. I'm a big fan of Soviet-era space technology, actually -- the stuff that has lasted is cheap and reliable -- but the process of developing it was something that would have been completely unacceptable to Americans, and rightly so.
True. Of course, the control station is also announcing its presence rather loudly ... the people we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan don't have the tech to take advantage of this, of course, but it would be a grave mistake to assume that our future enemies will be fighting with such a handicap.
Winning a war will, as always, be a combination of many factors. Economic power is only one of these; no doubt it will continue to be an important one.
As far as the specific issue of producing leading-edge UAVs goes, the USSR was not particularly good at either software or electrical engineering, IIRC. Command economies and totalitarian ideologies seem to be good at the brute-force, metal-bashing, rule-of-thumb kind of engineering, but not stuff requiring higher levels of precision. To the degree that the PRC is catching up, they're doing so by becoming steadily less "communist" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Let me get this straight: you let the opinions of the type of people who post semiliterate anonymous screeds on Slashdot dictate when, where, and how you use a useful piece of equipment? Wow.
I hate to say this, but Firewire's dead. Apple invented it and they've been the main ones pushing it; now that they're pretty clearly planning to get rid of it, there are no major industry players with an interest in its survival. I agree that it's a far superior standard for pushing any meaningful amount of data around, so I'm not at all happy about this state of affairs, but so it goes.
It's always nice to be reminded that Europeans can be just as bigoted and nationalistic as Americans can.
The little black bits inside missiles aren't supposed to be a symbol of Americanism. AF1 is.
When AF1 touches down you're supposed to think "America is in town!" (hurrah!)
Well, you know, that's what people are supposed to think when ICBM's touch down too. Er, without the "hurrah" part. For a very short time.
Yeah, I've noticed that those of us who were actually in the military don't generally throw around acronyms like that at the drop of a hat. It's the Tom-Clancy-reading, FPS-playing, mil-porn 101st Fighting Keyboarders who never had the guts to get their hands dirty themselves trying to make themselves sound (they think) all tough and macho who have popularized the term.
it is quite appropriate for the dot
"I was in the 'Dot, man! You don't know what it was like! You weren't there!"
It's my understanding that it's the abbreviation the Secret Service uses, which is fine; government agencies are famous for their love of alphabet soup. Then it was picked up by the 101st Fighting Keyboarders military-porn crowd, who love using acronyms like that because it makes them feel tough and macho, and spread from there.
The President is a manager, not a monarch. I'd argue that the nigh-royal treatment whoever is currently occupying the White House receives has a been a big part of the rise of the "Imperial Presidency" -- the isolation of the President from public opinion, the autocratic decisions without regard to the law, etc. I'm not saying he should live rough, but neither should we have to cradle him in luxury that Louis XIV would have envied.