"We will eventually find an explanation" is not a scientific theory but a philosophical position.
But... I didn't claim otherwise. What I have pointed out - repeatedly - is that the alternative philosophical positions are automatically self-defeating.
As it happens there are some good reasons to suspect first hand experience might not be material, I'll not risk confusing you further...
Your discomfort at the idea, though, does illustrate that even you do think this universe has a special quality that is different from other mathematical universes -- such that this universe can be "real" and others "fictional".
"Dubiousness" is different from "discomfort". But the idea that the difference between "real" and "fictional" is something fundamentally ineffable or outside of possible understanding or... well, whatever it is you're talking around, is just weird. From my perspective that distinction is just another thing we don't have a good handle on... yet.
Most scientists (I can point you to the UCLA and Boulder studies if necessary) assume there are some things that can be explained mechanistically and some things that can't.
Note the word "assume". I'm perfectly willing to concede that there might be things we can't understand. (And, in practice, 'understand' ends up meaning 'explain mechanistically'. The 'supernatural' always ends up meaning 'unknowable' in practice.) But... so what?
I asked you this before, and you didn't answer: "Seriously, we come across something we don't understand. How do we tell if it's just something we don't understand, or that we can't understand?"
I already gave my answer. We can either choose to try to understand it, or not. If we choose not to try, we won't ever figure it out. If we choose to try to understand it, we might figure it out. Even if we don't figure it out, we can't conclude that it's forever incomprehensible - someone else might figure it out later on. (Again, Tyson's essay has a long list of examples of precisely that.)
From a practical perspective, the concept of the 'unknowable' is of zero utility. There is no way whatsoever to tell the difference between something we don't understand and something we can't understand. Either way, the only realistic thing to do is keep trying to understand things. All we can ever realistically divide things into is "stuff we understand" and "stuff we don't understand yet".
Because none of that changes whether "we might find an answer tomorrow" is falsifiable or not, which was the topic you so strenuously objected to to start this whole long thread off.
But I didn't object to your point on grounds of falsifiabilty. Go ahead, check. I'll wait. There, see? Did you find the quote, "Neither can be 'proven' or argued from first principles"? How about the phrase, "From a practical perspective"?
I objected purely on the utilitarian, practical grounds above. Both positions - that at least some things are unknowable, or that nothing's unknowable - are unfalsifiable in practice. But the former is automatically self-defeating. It's a lot like solipsism - utterly proof against disproof, and utterly worthless as a philosophical position.
Particularly, the rule requiring third-party repeatable material experiments prevent us from answering questions that involve the non-material (the quality of this universe's actual existence versus other mathematical universes only mathematical existence) or by definition cannot be observed in a third-party manner (first-hand-observer experience).
Of course, you're assuming that the answers to those questions must be non-material. As ever, I simply refer you to Haldane, who was just as convinced as you.
Let's take first-person experience. If it supervenes on the brain (like, contra Haldane, inheritance supervenes on molecules), and we figure out how this happens (to use Haldane's terminology, we come up with a 'mechanistic theory of consciousness'), then we very likely will be able to determine if "my red" is the same color as "your red". You are free to doubt such a theory is possible. Personally, I'm willing to bet you'll be another notch on Tyson's list.
Hence why there is a difference between physics and meta-physics. The fudge that absolute materialists try is to "redefine" existence as only that which science can address -- "metaphysics is unscientific, therefore we'll use some rhetoric to label it 'unscientific' to believe that metaphysics exists" . It's not a solution, it's just wishing away the problem.
Sometimes a problem doesn't actually exist. I strongly suspect that a lot of these questions a problematic because we're looking at them wrong. People used to wonder if the Earth went on forever, or had an edge. It had to be one or the other, right? Then the hidden assumption that the Earth was flat was recognized, and the answer became obvious - "none of the above". I suspect the question of "has the universe existed forever or does it have a beginning (edge)?" is one of those questions. Similarly for "actual existence" versus "mathematical existence" - it's not clear to me that they are both actual types of "existence" per se. In what sense can it be said that the "Mandelbrot Set" exists?
Once we have that clarified, we might discover we've been just as wrong as the old 'endless Earth/edge' people were.
The case is that "we might find an explanation tomorrow" is unfalsifiable because there is always another tomorrow... And there are searches for rational explanations that we can never know whether they'll ever reach a conclusion.
You have, unfortunately, completely missed the point I'm trying to make.
We have a choice - a forced choice. We can assume that things can in fact be understood and explained, or that they can't. Neither can be 'proven' or argued from first principles. But if you assume something's inexplicable, you will stop trying to explain it. In my first response, I linked to Neil deGrasse Tyson's long list of scientists - even great scientists - who gave up too soon and resorted to supernatural "explanations". I linked to my own favorite example - J.S. Haldane - who clearly and rigorously understood a problem and explicitly gave up and resorted to a "spiritual" "explanation".
Seriously, we come across something we don't understand. How do we tell if it's just something we don't understand, or that we can't understand? If we don't try to understand it, we know we'll never grasp it. If we do try, we might figure it out. From a practical perspective, the difference between "unknown" and "unknowable" is moot. Either way, the only reasonable thing to do is assume it's understandable and get to work trying to figure it out. Anything else is automatically self-defeating.
Sure, "there are searches for rational explanations that we can never know whether they'll ever reach a conclusion". So what? We can either keep trying, or give up. The latter offers certainty, I guess... but it's awfully bleak certainty, no?
Actually that can be very clearly categorised. There are theoretically discoverable limits on knowledge, and with just a very little bit of thought (about what is and isn't acceptable scientific evidence) you can find any number of philosophical questions science cannot satisfactorily answer. Does the colour red look the same to you as it does to me? is one of the more famous examples of the mind-brain problem -- scientifically we can get as far as the electrochemistry in the brain but not to the (first-hand) experience. Absolute rational materialists usually try to duck the issue by insisting vehemently that the experience doesn't exist. Similarly, the difference between mathematical and actual existence ("why does this universe actually exist in a sense that any other set of equations I scribble on paper does not").
You did not read the links, in particular this one: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html. People have been giving up and asserting "this or that will never have a scientific explanation" for a long time... and someone else comes along and figures it out. We have a history of several thousand years showing that people are very frequently - quite possibly always - wrong when they claim "this can't be explained scientifically". Just saying "I don't see how that could be explained" is not a good case.
Consciousness is a current bugaboo, sure. We don't know how consciousness arises from the brain... yet. But I don't have to assert the experience doesn't exist to be very confident that it's intimately related to the brain. Here's another link for you where that case it laid out in detail: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/braincase.html. (Or just go read some Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who writes like a poet.)
Existence is another thing that we don't have answers for... yet. So? Before Benjamin Franklin, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to "What causes lighting?" was "Darn if I, or anyone else, knows... yet."
Roger Zelazny put it poetically, in his novel "Lord Of Light": "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."
Absolute rational materialism* is based on the assertion that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything.
Not necessarily. One can note that the list of things that have a "rational scientific explanation" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping track - the total has never gone down. Nothing's ever moved from the "has a rational scientific explanation" column to the "explained only supernaturally" column.
One can be a rational materialist and simply go with induction there.
Then there's the philosophical problem with the 'unknowable'. How can we, in practice, distinguish between something that doesn't have a "rational scientific explanation" and something that can't have one? From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be... but it also might be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt. Especially when one notes the documented risks of allowing supernatural explanations.
In practice, there ends up being no real difference between "absolute rational materialism" and just plain "rational materialism"... Either way, there's no point in accepting supernatural explanations. All you can say is, "we don't have a good account of that yet."
Back when calculator watches were cool, I had one die on me over the summer. I replaced it, melted the dead one with a magnifying glass, then hid it and waited until I went back to school. Then I waited more, for the right weather.
One night I wandered into the neighboring dorm room, hair wet from the rain, acting fuzzy.
Of course they thought I might be drunk. But I slurringly denied it. "No, I think I got hit by lightning."
Hoots of derision. "No, really. I was walking back here, and then I... I woke up... and my watch was like this." I held up my wrist with the melted face...
I wish I could have milked it a bit more, but I had to stop them before they called an ambulance.
My first computer had a 486/100MHz motherboard with ISA, VESA, and PCI slots. I eventually upgraded it to 64MB RAM. I wish my wife hadn't guilted me into giving to my brother-in-law a few years later.
Oh, well, I still have a VESA/ISA system with all the slots filled (SB32 sound, VESA video, IDE caching controller with 16MB SIMMS, tape controller)... the dream machine of 1993.
And we can't have that, people getting along understanding each other's views and disagreeing in a civil manner.
Um, issuing - and carrying out - death threats is not "disagreeing in a civil manner". If they aren't going to play by the rules of civilized discourse, why should we? At least we won't kill anybody. We'll just mock them.
In the high school gym, all the girls in the class were lined up against one wall, and all the boys against the opposite wall. Then, every ten seconds, they walked toward each other until they were half the previous distance apart. A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were asked, "When will the girls and boys meet?"
The mathematician said, "Never."
The physicist said, "In an infinite amount of time."
The engineer said, "Well... in about a minute and a half, they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."
For example, "chaotic climate" doesn't mean "completely unpredictable climate". It means "prediction precision is limited to a particular range, though maximum and minimum expected values can be derived". Look at the Lorenz Attractor. You can't predict exactly what it'll do, but you can say "It'll be somewhere in this region of phase space."
For some mathematicians, anything less than an exact analytic solution is unacceptable. But engineers and others who have to actually deal with the real world tend to be more accepting of ranges of uncertainty and working heuristics.
"...and not dealing aggressively with the abusers....the Church really wasn't out of step with the prevailing attitudes."
You have strung together two separate paragraphs, expressing two separate thoughts. Society at the time tended to prosecute 'stranger attacks', not assailants known to the victim - as you note. In that sense "the Church really wasn't out of step with the prevailing attitudes."
And, as I noted, the fact that the Church was not ahead of the curve does call their 'moral leadership' claims into question.
The bigger problem back then was probably many parents failed to report family or unrelated cases of child sexual assault out of fear it would hurt their kid more to have it publicized, or hurt the family in general. Which is no different than what was happening in the Church.
...which is basically what I said: "the Church really wasn't out of step with the prevailing attitudes".
Actually, I'm not aware of any solid data indicating that priests are more likely than anyone else to abuse children or young adults.
Not that I'm a fan of the Catholic Church (or any other religion). But the real problem was hiding the abuse and not dealing aggressively with the abusers.
And even then, to be fair, back in the 1970's and before, there weren't mandatory reporting laws for sexual abuse. Society in general has become more aware of the problems; the Church really wasn't out of step with the prevailing attitudes.
(Of course, what does that say about their claims to be moral leaders?)
I've got a TRG Pro as a backup now. It's basically a Palm IIIxe with a CF slot. I've got a 128MB CF card for it, which is practically infinite storage for Palm apps. And I can even stick an 802.11b Wifi card in it! Crazy what people squeezed into Palms back in the day.
I've been a Palm user for close to a decade (Palm IIIxe, Handera 330, Treo 650), and it's sad to see Palm go. The IIIxe has 8MB RAM and a 16MHz CPU, but it's still responsive and usable (and the batteries last for no trace of weeks). Palm knew what the heck they were doing, technically. The Treo didn't have true multitasking, but the actual UI layout was very carefully thought out and usable.
But I got a Droid a couple weeks ago and I'm not looking back. Migrating my data to either Android or WebOS would be about the same, and the Droid had better specs from my perspective and it just seems like
"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov
I have yet to see any fashion design sketches that were anatomically correct in their proportions. I gather that such sketches are meant to be impressionistic rather than realistic.
A Google image search confirms that. What I don't understand is, why are they like that? Is it some kind of tradition, or does it have some practical purpose not obvious to those with little fashion sense?
The original invaders were refugees, fleeing an even more powerful race. Now the humans need to team up with their former exterminators to have a hope of surviving this new threat...
Slashdot Mirror
As I, y'know, said, how do you tell which things are unknowable? Answer me that...
But... I didn't claim otherwise. What I have pointed out - repeatedly - is that the alternative philosophical positions are automatically self-defeating.
And good reasons to suppose otherwise. Again, I can't recommend Oliver Sacks enough. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" is a gentle introduction, but he's got plenty of other goodies. "An Anthropologist On Mars" is a longer read but rewarding.
"Dubiousness" is different from "discomfort". But the idea that the difference between "real" and "fictional" is something fundamentally ineffable or outside of possible understanding or... well, whatever it is you're talking around, is just weird. From my perspective that distinction is just another thing we don't have a good handle on... yet.
Note the word "assume". I'm perfectly willing to concede that there might be things we can't understand. (And, in practice, 'understand' ends up meaning 'explain mechanistically'. The 'supernatural' always ends up meaning 'unknowable' in practice.) But... so what?
I asked you this before, and you didn't answer: "Seriously, we come across something we don't understand. How do we tell if it's just something we don't understand, or that we can't understand?"
I already gave my answer. We can either choose to try to understand it, or not. If we choose not to try, we won't ever figure it out. If we choose to try to understand it, we might figure it out. Even if we don't figure it out, we can't conclude that it's forever incomprehensible - someone else might figure it out later on. (Again, Tyson's essay has a long list of examples of precisely that.)
From a practical perspective, the concept of the 'unknowable' is of zero utility. There is no way whatsoever to tell the difference between something we don't understand and something we can't understand. Either way, the only realistic thing to do is keep trying to understand things. All we can ever realistically divide things into is "stuff we understand" and "stuff we don't understand yet".
But I didn't object to your point on grounds of falsifiabilty. Go ahead, check. I'll wait. There, see? Did you find the quote, "Neither can be 'proven' or argued from first principles"? How about the phrase, "From a practical perspective"?
I objected purely on the utilitarian, practical grounds above. Both positions - that at least some things are unknowable, or that nothing's unknowable - are unfalsifiable in practice. But the former is automatically self-defeating. It's a lot like solipsism - utterly proof against disproof, and utterly worthless as a philosophical position.
Of course, you're assuming that the answers to those questions must be non-material. As ever, I simply refer you to Haldane, who was just as convinced as you. Let's take first-person experience. If it supervenes on the brain (like, contra Haldane, inheritance supervenes on molecules), and we figure out how this happens (to use Haldane's terminology, we come up with a 'mechanistic theory of consciousness'), then we very likely will be able to determine if "my red" is the same color as "your red". You are free to doubt such a theory is possible. Personally, I'm willing to bet you'll be another notch on Tyson's list.
Sometimes a problem doesn't actually exist. I strongly suspect that a lot of these questions a problematic because we're looking at them wrong. People used to wonder if the Earth went on forever, or had an edge. It had to be one or the other, right? Then the hidden assumption that the Earth was flat was recognized, and the answer became obvious - "none of the above". I suspect the question of "has the universe existed forever or does it have a beginning (edge)?" is one of those questions. Similarly for "actual existence" versus "mathematical existence" - it's not clear to me that they are both actual types of "existence" per se. In what sense can it be said that the "Mandelbrot Set" exists?
Once we have that clarified, we might discover we've been just as wrong as the old 'endless Earth/edge' people were.
You have, unfortunately, completely missed the point I'm trying to make.
We have a choice - a forced choice. We can assume that things can in fact be understood and explained, or that they can't. Neither can be 'proven' or argued from first principles. But if you assume something's inexplicable, you will stop trying to explain it. In my first response, I linked to Neil deGrasse Tyson's long list of scientists - even great scientists - who gave up too soon and resorted to supernatural "explanations". I linked to my own favorite example - J.S. Haldane - who clearly and rigorously understood a problem and explicitly gave up and resorted to a "spiritual" "explanation".
Seriously, we come across something we don't understand. How do we tell if it's just something we don't understand, or that we can't understand? If we don't try to understand it, we know we'll never grasp it. If we do try, we might figure it out. From a practical perspective, the difference between "unknown" and "unknowable" is moot. Either way, the only reasonable thing to do is assume it's understandable and get to work trying to figure it out. Anything else is automatically self-defeating.
Sure, "there are searches for rational explanations that we can never know whether they'll ever reach a conclusion". So what? We can either keep trying, or give up. The latter offers certainty, I guess... but it's awfully bleak certainty, no?
You did not read the links, in particular this one: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html. People have been giving up and asserting "this or that will never have a scientific explanation" for a long time... and someone else comes along and figures it out. We have a history of several thousand years showing that people are very frequently - quite possibly always - wrong when they claim "this can't be explained scientifically". Just saying "I don't see how that could be explained" is not a good case.
Consciousness is a current bugaboo, sure. We don't know how consciousness arises from the brain... yet. But I don't have to assert the experience doesn't exist to be very confident that it's intimately related to the brain. Here's another link for you where that case it laid out in detail: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/braincase.html. (Or just go read some Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who writes like a poet.)
Existence is another thing that we don't have answers for... yet. So? Before Benjamin Franklin, was it reasonable to say that God (or Thor, or the Thunderbirds, or Zeus, or Seth, or what have you) caused lightning? No, the proper response to "What causes lighting?" was "Darn if I, or anyone else, knows... yet."
Roger Zelazny put it poetically, in his novel "Lord Of Light": "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."
Not necessarily. One can note that the list of things that have a "rational scientific explanation" has been growing monotonically since we've been keeping track - the total has never gone down. Nothing's ever moved from the "has a rational scientific explanation" column to the "explained only supernaturally" column.
One can be a rational materialist and simply go with induction there.
Then there's the philosophical problem with the 'unknowable'. How can we, in practice, distinguish between something that doesn't have a "rational scientific explanation" and something that can't have one? From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be... but it also might be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt. Especially when one notes the documented risks of allowing supernatural explanations.
In practice, there ends up being no real difference between "absolute rational materialism" and just plain "rational materialism"... Either way, there's no point in accepting supernatural explanations. All you can say is, "we don't have a good account of that yet."
Apparently your DB purged all records before 1990.
One night I wandered into the neighboring dorm room, hair wet from the rain, acting fuzzy.
Of course they thought I might be drunk. But I slurringly denied it. "No, I think I got hit by lightning."
Hoots of derision. "No, really. I was walking back here, and then I... I woke up... and my watch was like this." I held up my wrist with the melted face...
I wish I could have milked it a bit more, but I had to stop them before they called an ambulance.
Oh, well, I still have a VESA/ISA system with all the slots filled (SB32 sound, VESA video, IDE caching controller with 16MB SIMMS, tape controller)... the dream machine of 1993.
Well, I didn't participate for those reasons. I did it because death threats offend me.
Um, issuing - and carrying out - death threats is not "disagreeing in a civil manner". If they aren't going to play by the rules of civilized discourse, why should we? At least we won't kill anybody. We'll just mock them.
I'm just full of quips today, I guess.
The mathematician said, "Never."
The physicist said, "In an infinite amount of time."
The engineer said, "Well... in about a minute and a half, they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."
For example, "chaotic climate" doesn't mean "completely unpredictable climate". It means "prediction precision is limited to a particular range, though maximum and minimum expected values can be derived". Look at the Lorenz Attractor. You can't predict exactly what it'll do, but you can say "It'll be somewhere in this region of phase space."
For some mathematicians, anything less than an exact analytic solution is unacceptable. But engineers and others who have to actually deal with the real world tend to be more accepting of ranges of uncertainty and working heuristics.
Yes, it did. I dunno why Slashdot's CSS makes the first "<p>" tag not display properly, but if you look at the page source, it's there.
You have strung together two separate paragraphs, expressing two separate thoughts. Society at the time tended to prosecute 'stranger attacks', not assailants known to the victim - as you note. In that sense "the Church really wasn't out of step with the prevailing attitudes."
And, as I noted, the fact that the Church was not ahead of the curve does call their 'moral leadership' claims into question.
And even then, to be fair, back in the 1970's and before, there weren't mandatory reporting laws for sexual abuse. Society in general has become more aware of the problems; the Church really wasn't out of step with the prevailing attitudes.
(Of course, what does that say about their claims to be moral leaders?)
...considering how badly they got bit by a patent themselves.
But actually, you can overclock the Droid if you root (jailbreak) it. I've heard of people clocking it up past a GHz (from the stock 550MHz): http://gizmodo.com/5457672/how-to-overclock-your-droid-possibly-to-death
I've been a Palm user for close to a decade (Palm IIIxe, Handera 330, Treo 650), and it's sad to see Palm go. The IIIxe has 8MB RAM and a 16MHz CPU, but it's still responsive and usable (and the batteries last for no trace of weeks). Palm knew what the heck they were doing, technically. The Treo didn't have true multitasking, but the actual UI layout was very carefully thought out and usable. But I got a Droid a couple weeks ago and I'm not looking back. Migrating my data to either Android or WebOS would be about the same, and the Droid had better specs from my perspective and it just seems like
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov
A Google image search confirms that. What I don't understand is, why are they like that? Is it some kind of tradition, or does it have some practical purpose not obvious to those with little fashion sense?
The original invaders were refugees, fleeing an even more powerful race. Now the humans need to team up with their former exterminators to have a hope of surviving this new threat...
...is there anything it can't do?