To talk a bit more about humanity's being special, its in large part in the brain. I would wager that almost every other bioligical system we have is bested by others in the animal kingdom. The brain turned adaptability from hardware to software. With a brain that can reason, the long process of evoultionary selection is not so necessary for short term environmental changes. Some of the environmental changes can be compensated for be behavioral (software) changes. This gives our species orders of magnitude greater adaptability.
By the way... forgot to say that I agree with you here completely.
Yes, but most biological systems come at a price. To continue with the gills analogy, a fish with even better gills than the versatile fish could cause extiniction of the more adaptable fish. Adaptability is important, but in the short run may make no difference to other organisms that use their biological resources more directly to the current environment, its a balance of both.
Agreed. See some of my replies to other replies to my post. Being generally fit and adaptable isn't a guarantee of your survival, but it puts the odds in your favor overall, even if they're against you in some specific environment. And as I said in my original post, generalist species can't just be jacks of all trades, but must become aces of many as well, in order to survive. The odds against that occurring are low but possible, and if it did occur it would be a huge advantage. That's all I'm saying. That an "ace of many trades" is objectively better than an "ace of one trade".
Bacteria win by biomass, adaptability, number, diversity of environments occupied, etc. It is the multicellular organisms that are highly specialized to niches and fragile in comparison.
Agreed, in general. I'm not trying to say that humans are the top of the evolutionary ladder. But there's one advantage I've already mentioned that we may have (time will tell) over any other species here. We may be able to leave the Earth at will. In that regard, we can occupy a far greater range of environments than even bacteria, which are limited to this Earth (except for a few types of spore that can survive in vacuum, but then they rely on chance impacts - or rides on human vessels - to get them into space in the first place).
In general I would agree with you, that being in a low, stable position is usually better. Bacteria will far outlast most everything else around, on a geological timescale.
But there is one circumstance that I can foresee where plants may eventually need humans. One that I've already mentioned. On an even grander timescale.
This planet won't last forever. Stars burn out eventually. Humans need plants to survive in general, but in the long run, plants (and all other life on this rock) may need humans for their own survival as well.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but you haven't convinced me enough to overcome my skepticism. If you really claim there is an objective criteria, come up with the numbers. What quality can we measure and turn into quantity? If you want to claim objectivity, we are talking about measurement and numbers.
I'm not sure how you would quantify it precisely, but the quality to be measured would be the sum of fitness-for-a-certain-environment measurements, for all possible environments. Say for example, you have ten possible environments, and one species has a fitness measure of "10" for one of them and "1" for the other nine. Another species has a fitness measure of "5" for all ten environments. The latter would be more fit - a score of 50 versus 19. It doesn't mean that the second will definitely outlive the first, say if they happen to be competing in the environment where the first is a "10". But the odds overall are in favor of the second.
As far as 'fitness' or 'superiorty', you're delving into teleology there. I'm very keen on hearing your argument as to why reproducing is 'better', in any objective, scientific sense, than going extinct. My first inclination is to think that it is a recapitulation of the Biblical commandment to "go forth and multiply", a value that has so permeated our culture.
In evolutionary terminology, fitness is *defined as* ability to reproduce successfully. I'm just working within that definition. (Though to go off on a wild tangent, I would make an argument that the proper definition of "good" in a general philosophical sense is closely related. But that'd be going way off topic).
Good point. However, this is more or less what I was getting at with the phrase "survival of the fittest for a certain environment" bit.
That's specifically the point I was further qualifying though. That a species which is fit for MANY environments is overall more fit than a species which is fit only for one small niche environment.
Plus, it's worth noting that not all evolutionary progress pays off. To get back to your own counterpoint about amphibious fish surviving when the pond dries up, those same fish would be a less successful species right up until the point where the water based life dies. They'd probably be a marginal species that outlives the specialists by a stroke of luck.
That makes the assumption that, in addition to the advantages of amphibiousness, said fish species also has other disadvantages in the aquatic environment. I'll certainly agree that it seems *unlikely* for one species to have all the advantages (or competitively equivalent advantages) of an aquatic specialist species in addition to further adaptations that allow it to live on land, and as such, marginal species are usually out-competed by specialists on either side of the margin. But it's not impossible that you could have a species which is very successful in the water and also at least capable on the land. It's highly improbable that such a species would evolve, but then advantageous mutations are always improbable. Nevertheless, should such a creature by chance evolve, it seems that it would be a more fit species than a purely aquatic species, all other things being equal.
In other words, a species which is as fit to survive in many environments as other species are to survive in just one environment, is more fit overall. But the odds of such a species evolving in the first place are low. Which is just to say that phenomenal success is rare. I don't think any of that is in question.
Often the generalists outlive the specialists, and humans are definately in the specialist category (we're completely dependant on man-made tools to survive).
How does being dependent on oneself make one a specialist? I'd consider it just the opposite. The species discussed in TFA is completely dependant on it's "genetic swiss army knife" for it's survival, but that "swiss army knife" is very adaptable and carried with it everywhere it goes, which makes that species very adaptable and thus highly fit to survive. Likewise, humans are completely dependent on the products of our intellect for our survival in most environments, but we carry that intellect with us everywhere we go, it's a part of us, so the flexibility that that intellectual power grants us, makes us a flexible and adaptable and thus highly fit species.
However, I completely agree with you that generalists tend to outlive specialists. In fact that's my entire point. Generalists are more adaptable, more fit to survive in many environments, and thus more fit overall - more likely to outlive more specialized species.
In actuallity, survival of the fittest implies fittness for a certain environment only. To borrow someone else's analogy, you can have the best gills in the pond and you'll still die off with the rest if the pond dries up.
It's always seemed to me that there *is* an objective criterion for superiority in a species. Since we're judging superiority as fitness or the ability for a certain pattern (the genome) to continue propagating, then the superior species would be that one most able to overcome a greater variety of possible roadblocks to it's survival. To use your analogy, an amphibious fish, with watertight skin that can also breath air, would be objectively better by these criteria because it doesn't need the pond. It can live on land if need be.
In short, adaptability is what makes a species "superior". This is what has made homo sapiens the dominant large animal species on the planet - our intelligence has allowed us to adapt to damn near every (land) niche on the planet. Rats are a highly fit species for this same reason, as are cockroaches, and many fungi and microorganisms. All of these species are well-rounded and adaptable. (And by this criteria, this new species featured in TFA is likewise highly advanced). The one thing that I can see possibly giving mankind an edge up out of that group is our ability to radically change and even create environments around us, most notably including the ability to leave this planet of our own volition. (While some spores can survive in space, they couldn't just pack up and leave when the sun goes Red Giant on us all. We might be able to).
And since highly adaptable species are more fit to survive over longer periods of time, then evolutionary pressure *will* tend to select for them. And in that sense there is a sort of teleology to evolution: over time, as environments change back and forth and around to a variety of different extremes, the most flexible, adaptable, and generally well-rounded species will tend to outlive the rest. To survive in particular niches against competition from species specialized to those niches, they will have to become more capable in many areas as well; not simply jacks of all trades, but also aces of many.
You're certainly right that the old concepts of some sort of linear progression culminating in mankind are inaccurate. But that doesn't mean you have to deny any sort of progression, or any sort of objective criteria for discerning superiority or fitness between species.
Apple's Newton OS had a persistent object oriented database storage system, rather than a filing system. Changes to things would get frequently written to the database, so you never had to remember to save anything.
I like the idea of having data automatically stored as you enter it, but then saving also has the advantage of allowing you to revert something to the last saved version if you don't like the changes you've made, etc. I know that persistent infinite undo/redo would allow this as well, but in the just-for-the-hell-of-it studies in UI/OS design I've done, I like to have in-file versioning which preserves some of the traditional elements of "saving". There would always be a "working" version of the file auto-saved. Then the "Save" command would commit the current working version's changes to the last saved version. "Save As...", instead of saving a copy under a different name, saves as a new version of the file, preserving the previous version as it was before edits and committing the changes made to the working version to a new version of the file (with a prompt to name/number that version). There would of course be corresponding "Revert" (to last saved version) and "Revert To..." (some specified earlier version) commands as well.
The notepad application supported multiple types of stationary, and this was expandable. Indeed many applications could be similarly extended, such as the address book and calendar.
Do you know if the Newton technology was at all related to OpenDoc? They were contemporary projects, so I would imagine so...
Sounds like I would like it. But then, what I'd really like is a document-centric system where there is no such thing as "saving" a new document, only saving changes to an existing one. The kind of system where the first thing you do is create a file where you want it and called what you like, then open that and edit it.
Metaphors aren't all bad
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A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The fact is, making something "user friendly" means making the front-end more simple -- and thus making the back-end more complicated. But this complexity always eventually compounds and compounds until the end user can't understand what's happening and gets confused. In the end, we learn that computers are easier to use if you understand the back-end, and that can only happen if you use a minimum of metaphor. That is-- a straight-forward system that is obvious and transparent.
While I agree completely with the point you're making, the first sentence of this paragraph seems to contradict it. Unless you just mean that when people *commonly speak of* making things "user friendly", they're talking about hiding things for the sake of simplicity while actually adding complexity. But that's certainly not the way it has to be, which seems to be the overarching point you're making.
People (users and programmers) seem to think that making something user-friendly involves hiding complexity behind some kind of "wizard" or cheesy metaphor, because the legacy systems underlying most computers in the world and irreversibly complex kludges full of inconsistencies and weird hacks. When you have a very complex system with lots of little rules and exceptions to those rules, it's damn near impossible to make that "user friendly" without hiding it all under the rug.
Instead, the better approach - though I understand why it's largely impractical for reasons of backwards compatibility - is just to have the underlying system less complex to begin with, and then let the users look "directly" at that - whether that be via GUI or CLI doesn't matter. Have the underlying system operate according to the smallest number of rules that can be consistently adhered to while still achieving the necessary functionality, and then present the operation of those rules to the user in the clearest and most consistent manner possible. Maybe attach a metaphor to each rule (e.g. the "directories are like folders, disks are like filing cabinets" analogy works well), but make sure that there's a 1:1 correlation between metaphorical objects and the "real" (logical) objects dealt with by the computer.
For an example of how NOT to do things... One of my biggest complaints about Apple's declining UI standards (which used to be top-notch) has been the way that iPhoto organizes it's albums (or at least used to... I've been told this is different in newer versions, but haven't confirmed that). When you create an album in iPhoto, and move your photos into there, it's not actually creating a folder on the HD and moving or even copying your photos into that. The iPhoto album grouping is contained entirely in iPhoto. This means that if I want to send someone an album, I can't just zip some folder in my iPhoto library and send it... I've got to go into iPhoto and "export" those photos. (This has the further fault, aside from not accurately mapping metaphor onto what's really happening with the data, of reinforcing the false notion that files are "in" programs. I get so tired of users telling me, when asked where such-and-such file is, that it's "in Word". I'd go so far as to abolish all Open dialogs if it'd make users realize there's a structure on their disk organizing their files, and that files don't live inside of programs).
So yeah. Metaphors aren't bad, so long as the metaphor accurately maps on to what's really happening - i.e. so long as the system is transparent. If you've got a very complex system underneath, making it transparent is going to make it user-unfriendly. But hiding what's really going on will also make it user-unfriendly, for the reasons you stated in the quoted paragraph. So your only solution is to have the underlying system itself be simple, but flexible and thus powerful, and then present that simplicity transparently to the user. Then your users won't have much to learn, and once they've learned those few rules, the entire possible realm of functionality in the system will be at their fingertips.
Why did you post that in reply to the parent's facetious post? I'm seeing more and more of this on Slashdot and it's a serious annoyance. The mod system isn't terrible and if your post is good enough it will get modded up. However if your post is a mediorce one piggybacked on a funny first post, that will get modded up in preference to a potentially better one below.
Couldn't you have just started a new thread instead of piggybacking on the funny post? People read those you know.
I used to do this as well, because the top-level "reply" button was not immediately obvious, at least not as obvious as the "Reply to This" links below each message. Maybe the person you're responding to is just having the same navigational difficulties that I once did.
While I won't say anything bad about System Shock or Shodan as a character, I've one minor gripe with this summary. Certainly depth and complexity the likes of which are described here is rare in a video game character, I must object to the phrase "a truly unique character" with one simple retort:
For the first nanosecond after the big bang, the rules of physic were different, but very unstable.
The laws of physics cannot change. Otherwise they wouldn't be laws.
The variables can change, but the equations stay the same. If it was possible for mass-energy to be created or destroyed under some circumstances in the past, then it's possible for it to be created or destroyed under similar circumstances in the future. But that's not what the laws of physics as we presently understand them say. There's no special exceptions that say mass-energy is conserved under *almost all* circumstances, except when such-and-such variables get to extreme values. It's just conserved. Always.
Of course, none of that is to say that what we currently think are "the laws of physics" are the real, eternal laws of physics. We thought Newton was dead on for a long time before realizing his calculations don't always work in certain extreme circumstances.
That's actually my own argument against closed loops, leaving only infinity as possibility; though people generally acknowledged as smarter than me (i.e. professors) have argued against me that I just don't understand enough math to grok why closed loops work, but I don't really buy that line.
The same argument works against creationist theories (not necessarily in the Biblical sense, though it works there too; but I'm including "the Big Bang was the start of all existence" as a creationist theory). It's late and I probably shouldn't be writing and you're an anonymous coward anyway so likely nobody will read this, but the jist of it is sort of a twist on the old "First Mover" argument for God's existence. We've got this finite amount of space and time we're aware of. Where did it come from? You give some explanation... where did the thing that explains it come from? If you work it around to some loop, you're now thinking in, essentially, higher-dimensional space; imagining the loop existing within some larger framework, so then you can ask (as you essentially did) what else is in that larger framework besides the loop we've established? Where did that larger framework (essentially, a "larger universe") come from? What created it?
That was a really bad summary, maybe I'll clarify later if anybody cares, but the point I'm trying to make is that when it comes down to it you need at least one infinite eternal thing in your explanation to serve as a backdrop against which everything else is painted. Medieval Christian philosophers used this to prove God's existence: "God" is that one infinite thing that has always been and always will be. I don't entirely disagree with that, but that's just because I hold that the universe is God. "The universe" is by definition all of existence, so if God exists then he is either some part of existence - which could work for older polytheistic notions of gods, but not for one great all-powerful God - or God is the sum of all existence. God is the universe. And since you need something infinite in any complete explanation, and nothing in the universe is infinite or eternal (otherwise it'd be the only thing in the universe), and the notion of "beyond the universe" is nonsensical, then the universe itself must be that infinite eternal thing.
It's a good thing not even one pico-joule of energy has been created from nothing in the history of the universe, otherwise we might be here to appreciate this invention.
This is my favorite way of proving that time is infinite or at least a closed loop.
Mass-energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This means it never will be created or destroyed and never has been created or destroyed. Thus, is mass-energy has never been created, then either there is none (demonstrably false), or it has always existed back infinitely.
There cannot have been a "creation" of the universe. There could be a point back in history beyond which we are unable to observe, and everything which we can observe could have originated from that point, but there was still something before that, and there may still be plenty beyond the observable universe.
And what of the things that are just know, i.e. your "logic". Neither proven nor provable, nor able to be disproven. Meaningless?
Logic isn't some sort of fact to be proven or disproven, believed or disbelieved. Logic is the method of proof. Logic is just how thought works. THAT logic is how thought works is just an undeniable truth the same as the fact THAT I can see and hear and that's how my senses work. It's the higher-level facts about the the world which build upon those sorts of undeniable truths which I was categorizing into disprovable, provable and meaningless.
Really, is that how it happens? You're sitting, thinking your calm, and you heartbeat gets fast, you notice hairs standing up, and you go, "Oh, wow, I think I'm afraid. How interesting. I wouldn't have noticed if not for the hairs standing up and the racing pulse." Or do you just feel fear? Isn't fear its own feeling, independant of any of the physical phenomena which might accompany it? Could you be afraid without hairs standing up, for example? Without your heart beating faster? So what is it that truly demonstrates to you that you're afraid?
Like I said, it's a subtle and complex sensation which most people don't bother to break down into it's constituent parts. I don't notice each individual thing happening at once and then conclude from that that I must be afraid - I notice this set of things happening in my body which together we call "fear". But if those things weren't happening, I wouldn't be inclined to say I was afraid. I might be cautious, which is to say I might carefully consider apparent dangers, but if I'm not having that physiological reaction, I don't really see how you could call that "fear".
Also, do you need to prove that you're afraid, and can you prove that you're not, or do you simply know?
Again, as I said, it's just an observation. It's one of those undeniable truths - like the fact that I'm seeing an image which I call a "computer monitor" right now - from which proofs are built. (I assume you're using the strict logical sense of proof, whether deductive or inductive; not the looser sense that I have used at points which includes direct observation itself). So no, you don't need to prove it, in that sense. In the looser sense I used earlier, then yes, you do, but "proving" it is as simple as observing that it is so. There's no work to be done.
I don't mean to be condescending, but you see what's happening? You're trying to explain something to me as though you have all the answers and I don't, and I'm trying to explain something to you as though you're the student. Your sense that I'm being condescending comes from the fact that you believe that you know more and that I have no right to play the part of the teacher, which is equally condescending. Maybe in this fact we are equals.
I'd like to suggest that you be more ready to play the student, since that's when you're more likely to learn something. When you assume that you know more than the person with whom you're speaking, it only leaves you open to lecturing. However, what I just wrote will probably seem condescending.
I'm not even looking at this from a perspective or who knows more or less. It's not an antagonistic debate to me, about proving one person right or wrong. It's just a chat. A dialogue. The things you say make me rethink my own thoughts so I can try to rephrase them to you in a way that you will see that they are obviously true - that is, that you already agree, or at least that agreement follows from earlier premises that we already agree upon, once you get what it is that I was trying to say. I'd only expect you to do the same thing back: try to restate your opinion in a way that that I will see that it's obviously true (though you don't really need to do so, since I don't disagree with you). All philosophy (as a process) really is is clearing up our thoughts and our words - the premises that it relies upon are just those things that are intuitively obvious to everyone, so the
Well, again, i think we differ on how we can talk about this. I'm not sure the degree to which we actually disagree.
I never assumed we did. At least I haven't disagreed with anything you've said, rather just tried to clarify what I said so that you can see that we're essentially in agreement already.
I'd be tempted to ask (hypothetically) what you would do if you felt compelled to believe something that could not be systematized into a logical/scientific framework? Where would your loyalty lie, towards truth or logic? It sounds, however, that you're inclined to say that the truth that couldn't be systematized would still be "logic", which I don't follow.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by a truth that could not be systematized. There are of course things which I'm inclined to believe without having the full (pragmatic) ability to prove them systematically, yet still I'd hold that anything which is true *could* in principle be proven (or simply demonstrated), even if that would be very difficult for us (or I) to do at the moment. For example, I couldn't off of top of my head tell you how to prove that the Earth is round, but I believe that the Earth is round, and as I recall having seen a trigonometric method by which to prove that before, I'm pretty certain that it *could* be proven that the Earth is round.
Something that could be disproven clearly must be false (since you can't validly disprove something which is actually true). Something that could not be proven or disproven, even in principle, is meaningless, for it apparently has no effect on anything at all which we could check to see if it's true or not. Which just leaves things that *could be* proven as the truth. (Where "proof" here includes simple empirical demonstration).
"I'm afraid", for example, seems to be a statement that is neither logical nor illogical.
The recognition of one's own emotional states is just an empirical observation. One senses one's fear with the same tangible immediacy as one senses object via sight or touch or smell. I know when I'm afraid because my heartbeat gets fast and shallow, my hairs stand on end and I get a little numb, and various muscles in my body tense up. I can feel these things the same way I can feel the chair I'm sitting in now. I know that I'm sitting in a chair because I can feel it. I know when I'm afraid the exact same way. It's just a more a subtle and complex kind of sensation, and most people never break it down to all the particular bits that make it up like I just did. They just feel "fear".
So awareness of emotion isn't something that *needs* to be logically derived from empirical observations. It just *is* an empirical observation.
I think "God" is too big a topic to tackle before we have "being" and "knowledge" straight (or unless it comes up through other means). And I don't remember claiming to have a "God", but maybe your remembering a past conversation (I think we must have gotten into something on/. before).
The talk of God was just an example subject, something people wouldn't normally think of as a scientific thing. And "your" was being used rhetorically there; not "you, Nine-time's god...", but "anyone in particular's conception of God must be..." etc etc.
I'm not too interested in getting into a Socratic dialectic, though-- it requires too much, if you know what I mean. If I'm going to play the part of Socrates, for example, then I'd have to get you angry, which is too hard to do over the internet-- and not always fun.
I think you got a different impression of Socrates than I did. It seems to me that Socrates wasn't trying to piss people off - he just wound up stumping people, which has a tendency to piss people off. But making them angry wasn't a part of his plan, and seems to me that that kind of approach is completely antithetical to his methods. Emotional manipulation like that is something a Sophist would pull. Not Socrates.
In general, this last post makes me think that there are a lot of linguistic problems in our discussion.
I agree.
I've never read/met anyone involved in philosophy, for example, who would be willing to say that Kantian intuition is part of logic, but rather people might say that logic and mathematics are based on temporal/spacial intuition.
I'm not saying it's a part of logic. I'm saying they are essentially the same thing. This seems to be one of our points of confusion. I say that A just is B, you hear that A is justified by B, or based on B, or a kind of B, which isn't what I mean. For this example, I'm saying that logic is just a formalized/symbolized way of communicating intuitive (in the Kantian sense) truths, thus, when you are speaking of logic, you are simply speaking of intuition. A clearer (though not perfectly analogous) example might be that when you're talking about bachelors, you're just using that word 'bachelor' to refer to men who aren't married; and likewise (more analogously) when you're talking about "men" you're just talking about those things [gesturing at images of men]. Words all ultimately refer back to "images" (for lack of a better term for sense-data that encompasses all five senses, observed and imagined), or abstract elements of such "images". So logic is just spoken intuition, and likewise, intuition is just unspoken logic.
However, I'd agree that "truth" is necessarily bound up in intuition and sense (which I guess seems to be where you're going), but it's also bound to things like feeling and emotion. Those things are sometimes equally undeniable. Aristotle (who for many purposes should be considered the father of what people generally call "logic") said that logic itself was only to be believed because it elicited a feeling that it could not be denied (which is not to say that it was the only thing that could not be denied), and so other feelings which are also undeniable has equal share of truth.
In the philosophical system I'm writing up (I am a philosophy student, and am writing a book formalizing my system of philosophy), I speak of four different sources of ideas (which correspond to Kant's three kindas plus analytic a posteriori), and four different... I'm still trying to think of a proper term for them, but they're basically "kinds of 'action'", which correspond to those sources of ideas. With synthetic a posteriori (observation) goes actual action, physically doing things. With analytic a priori ("logic" in the symbolic, lingual sense) goes intention, the 'act' of conscious planning to do something. With analytic a posteriori (learning definitions via communication) goes declaration, the 'act' of asserting that something ought to be done, declaring it as a law or imperative. And with synthetic a priori (intuition) goes emotion, the 'act' of feeling, wanting, desiring something to be. So I would say that intuition *just is* the undeniable emotional feeling of truth. If it is an undeniable feeling that something must be true, in the fullest sense that you are utterly incapable - not just very unwilling - of imagining that it could not be so, then it just is intuition, and to communicate that formally just is logic. Anything less than that full undeniability is just "truthiness", and we all know the failings that relying on that can lead to.
Sometimes these truths are, however, what most people would call "illogical". Hell, sometimes those truths are downright crazy, and still manage to be true.
Care to name some? I can't imagine anything that I could have a truly undeniable (see above qualifications) feeling of truth about that I would call "illogical" or "crazy". Then again, I'm not most people.
It'd take us a lot more discussion, I think, before we'd get very far in this, but the great failing of many philosophers (especially modern, post-"scientific method" philosophy) is an unwillingness to talk about anything that cannot be driven through a mathmatical proof of some kind.
Is it the same to say, "I know faith works because it would be faithless for it not to"? What's the difference between that and what you said?
Because it's possible to not have faith in something, therefore just the fact that you have faith in something doesn't make it true. I can choose to believe something on faith or not. But it's not possible to think an illogical thought (again, at least not for me, and my own mind the only one I can really talk about). I can think two separate thoughts which contradict each other, but I can't simultaneously think them both, no matter how much I might want to. The closest I could do is set up careful mental blocks to never consider them both at the same time, or fiddle with what I mean by both terms so they're not actually contradictory at all. The latter is actually a quite useful dialectical tool for reconciling opposing viewpoints.
See, there's not even a logical problem in saying, "It would be illogical for logic to fail to 'work', but it doesn't work." You see, because if it doesn't 'work', then there's no logical problem in truth being "illogical".
That's (ironically) logically correct, but there's still the problem of illogical things being inconceivable and thus impossible. Square circles can't exist, because... what the hell is a square circle? I can't even imagine what that might be, because it's an illogical, contradictory thing... unless you fudge the meanings of "square" and "circle" in which case you could get a rounded rectangle or something. Reality must be logical because for it to be otherwise is inconceivable, and I don't mean in the Vizzini sense of the word. And that's all that logic deals with, the conceivable and the inconceivable, the possible and the impossible. Illogical things are, by definition, logically impossible.
You see, because if the impossible is possible, then there's no problem in truth possibly being "impossible".
Exactly. And you can dig deeper than empiricism. There's lots of philosophical writing on this. If you want something explicit, though overly-simplistic, check out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Whole big chuncks are about why empiricism fails us. There are better works on the subject, but they're generally less straight-forward. Plato's Theatetus, for example, is a great piece on the foundation of knowledge, but you have to know how to read Plato if you want to get anywhere.
I've read Kant, though it's been a while now. I'm quite fond of his transcendental idealism and my own views are quite similar to his. You'll note that I've already said much about experiences and the relations between them being the fundamental building blocks of "reality" - the "noumenal" world is just an imaginary thing that we assume exists, and what we think it is like is just a reasoned extrapolation from our experiences. I don't think I've read Theatetus, but I read a lot of Plato a long time ago so I might have just forgotten it.
I get the feeling that what you're nudging at is something like what Kant called "intuition" (which is a term I also use in a similar way in my own formal writing, though I've been using it in the more colloquial sense here). And I guess my response is that I'm including that category of thought under what I've been calling "logic", by which I really mean a priori reasoning in general, not necessarily logic in the formal, symbolic, linguistic sense. The way I look at things, formal logic and mathematics, once you fill in the variables, simply refers to "intuitive" concepts, by which I mean basically imagination, internal visualization. For example: logically, if no A's are B's, something cannot be both an A and a B. Fill in the blanks: since squares and circles are completely exclusive sets of shapes, nothing can be a square circle. This just means that I can't imagine, conceive of or visualize something that matches both the definition of a square and a circle. Likewise with math: 2 + 2 = 4 just means that if I imagine two things, and another two things, and
Well, exactly, it either leads to infinite regression, which leads to the volatilization of all truth and knowledge, or declaration of something as unquestionable. Obviously, something must be unquestionable if you ever want to claim hold of anything as "true", however, you cannot declare that thing to be unquestionable by virtue of scientific reasoning. It must be something that is unquestionable because you know it through a faculty that is both immediate and unquestionable.
What I'm saying is that scientific reasoning *just is* reliance upon those immediate and unquestionable faculties. Those immediate and unquestionable faculties *are* logic and my senses. I know they work because they say they work and I'm unable to conceive of them possibly not working. I know logic works because it would be illogical for it not to. I know my senses work because I sense things. These faculties are the only things I can't find a way to doubt; they are the most immediate and unquestionable aspects of myself and the world; and to rely on them as the ultimate grounds for justification is all it means to think scientifically.
The alternative? You have to accept that you have no grounding for knowledge. You don't even have a grounding for an approximation of uncertain knowledge. You just have no grounding whatsoever, to the degree that you cannot even claim to lack grounding, because you need some grounds on which to base that claim. You don't really want to be there.
This term "ground" made me think of a nice metaphor. Critical philosophy, the method of doubt, the scientific method, all work by first digging "down", trying to disprove and doubt everything possible, and then building "up", deriving conclusions from whatever survives the criticism. The metaphor that I thought of is that "the deeper you dig, the stronger your foundation". And it certainly seems like rational empiricism is "hitting bedrock". But who knows? Maybe there is something deeper than that. But we can't seem to dig any further, so that is where we lay our foundation. Yet still, if we ever were to figure out how to dig deeper than that, then *that* would be a better place to lay our foundation.
You're right that you need a foundation to build on, but it's not certain that there is any natural, ultimate foundation, i.e. "bedrock". Maybe you just lay your foundation as deep as you can and build up from there, but there is no bottom, only deeper and harder rock. We can't really know either way; all we can know is "this is as deep as we can go". And for all intents and purposes, that's the bottom, and anything that builds up from that is "true".
Even if all that were possible, it still leaves you with no knowledge. None. Whatsoever. Any given statement only falls into "disproven" or "yet to be disproven", but never "true". And that's after you've already assumed true (on faith, if not knowledge, and you're saying you can't have knowledge) that cynicism is the road to truth. Yet this cynicism never gets you to truth.
Criticism, not cynicism. I'm not denying the ability to reach the truth, just giving a theory/description/definition of what qualifies as "true". Anything that cannot be doubted is true, necessarily so, because it's not conceivable that it could be false (which is why we can't doubt it); and anything that necessarily follows (i.e. can be proven) from those truths is also true. Conversely, anything which can be doubted, and anything that cannot be proven without those doubtable things taken for granted, should be assumed false. And of course, anything that flatly contradicts something that can be proven true from indubitable premises is certainly false.
Predictive theories, as most scientific theories are, are a bit fuzzier, because they deal with inductive premises, "this seems to be true": noticing a pattern in a big series of indubitable truths (individual observations), and assuming that that pattern continues. The conclusions they derive are thus never absolutely certain, merely extreme
The problem you're describing just leads to the regress argument. How do you justify what it is you used to justify the use of logic and senses? And then how do you justify THAT? It leads to either an infinite regress, the declaration of some thing as unquestionably foundational, or circular self-supporting coherentism.
What I'm saying is that you don't exactly justify anything, at least not at the deepest level. You criticise everything, try to call into doubt all you can, and then use whatever holds up to criticism as your "foundation", and from there you can justify other things. And again, the scientific method has this embedded in itself, with the notion that you can never prove (completely justify) a theory, but rather just disprove or fail to disprove a theory. Theories that hold up well to criticism are used and considered "true", or at least "truer" than less resilient theories. The reliance on senses and logic as an epistemological theory is no different.
Now maybe this criticism thing is the deeper justification you were talking about, but to think of it as a justification is to fall back into regress again, and defy the very notion of critical philosophy.
This form of knowledge is better and more certain than that gained through 'science', because 'science' gains it's certainty though this knowledge, not the other way around.
And I'm saying that science - as in the methodology of science, not any particular body of scientific theories - is identical with those "other" ways of knowledge. The only things I can't doubt are logic and my senses, so they are the foundation of all certainty and thus knowledge. The scientific method just says "apply logic to your senses, and repeat". It's the same way of knowing.
If by "science" you mean not the methodology, but rather "scientific theories", then you're right. Any particular scientific theory is founded on this deeper way of knowing, so my knowledge of the theory of gravity or the theory of electromagnetism are founded on those deeper sources, logic and my senses. But that's just to say that they're founded on the scientific method. That's all a scientific theory is: a story that is logically consistent with itself, and thus far consistent with our senses (which also excludes talk of things that could not, in principle, be empirically verified or sensed, like "God" or "souls", by the common definitions thereof; or Platonic "forms", or Kant's "noumenal" world).
Any other sort of appeal to "science", along the lines of "that can't be right because it contradicts the predictions/mechanisms of such-and-such theory" (rather than the observations which support that theory, which would be a valid appeal to science), isn't really an appeal to science at all. It's an appeal to the religion of Scientism, that is, the blind faith that what Scientists say is true, as congregations follow their preachers or disciples their gurus. You know, those Scientists people are always talking about, when they say "Scientists have discovered that..." or "Scientists say...". That, I think, is why religious folk are often to averse to science. They see it as just another bunch of explanations, a competing religion, and miss that what makes it special is the methodology that justifies those explanations. The explanations (theories) themselves are just our best working hypotheses and can and will change as they have in the past.
Unfortunately it seems that a lot of common "science-minded" (i.e. non-traditionally-religious) people actually do just believe science on blind faith in scientists and don't understand the methodology either. Accepting theories partially on faith isn't so bad for most people, to whom the precise way that gravity or quantum electrodynamics or evolution works doesn't matter to them, so long as someone else who can make productive use of such knowledge understands it properly. But it's an important general life skill to understand the methodology of science, and critical thinking in general. It makes people better able to adapt to a changing world, and keeps them from being manipulated with lies and misdirection. That's why science matters. Today's theories are just today's theories and in three hundred years we'll look like foolish children for believing them, but (assuming for the sake of argument that we don't fall into a new Dark Age) our descendants then will be able to see why we could think such things, given the limited data we've got now, because the methodology is timeless.
The scientific method is mere refinement to the same kind of thinking that the great philosophers of the ancient world used - namely, restricting the domain of what we reason about to things we can observe, rather than just reasoning off of people's common intuitions. Even then, a lot of the great old philosophers did constrain themselves largely to the sensible world. Then we fell into a dark age of thinking that truth was a function of what people believed, rather than the other way around. In that dark age, governments were monarchial, so the truth was whatever the king said it was. In the new dark age we're heading into, we've still got that threat, plus a new, more democratic kind of faulty thinking: this noti
On a related note, ever notice how all the research and development facilities in the United States are in the West and the South (the land of the troglodytes), away from the vaunted Ivy-League colleges of the East coast, the land of the enlightened?
I'll grant you most of the snobby elitism I hear comes from this "Ivy League" place back east, but since when is the west considered a land of "troglodytes"? I have of course heard the stereotype of the ignorant southerner before, and much about the inland states as well (which maybe you mean by "west"? there's another half a continent out past that you know), but I've never heard anything comparable about the west coast. Maybe there's bias in the opinions I come across since I live out here in California, but I've not heard such a stereotype in the internet before either.
Isn't that a bit loose? Obviously, the scientific method isn't a theory at all, it's just a method.
I didn't mean theory in the scientific sense. I was actually searching for another word, but failed to come up with one. The belief/hypothesis/pick-your-term that the scientific method is "the right method" (yes, I am struggling for appropriate words here) is an epistemological theory (again, not in the scientific sense). It's nothing but a statement of empiricism: that all knowledge derives from reasoning about our sensations. The scientific method is just a decree to act on the advice that follows from that epistemological theory... namely, "make observations, derive reasoned conclusions from them, and repeat indefinitely".
You seem to have adopted an epistemological theory that knowledge can only be attained through this one particular method, which is obviously false. After all, what in our senses could have taught us to trust this method?
You're either asking how one would learn what is the correct theory of epistemology, or how one would come to believe a particular theory of epistemology. The answer to the first question is itself an epistemological question, for epistemology deals with knowledge, i.e. JUSTIFIED belief. I don't know the answer to that, and you're right that any attempt to answer it would be circular. To justify a belief in a theory of epistemology would require that you already take some epistemological theory for granted. Which is why I don't try to justify any theory of epistemology but rather try to call into question all epistemological theories and see what holds up. Which is also why the answer to the second question is easy. I believe that empiricism is the correct theory of epistemology because I am unable to do otherwise, no matter how I might try.
It is undeniably apparent that that "logic works" (again struggling for words here), because logic is just how the mind works. My mind at least - I don't know for sure if there are any others, much less how they work, so mine's the only thing I've got to go on. I cannot simultaneously think that P and not-P are true at the same time and in the same way. I might at one time think that P is true, and then at another time think that not-P is true, but if such a contradiction is presented to me, I've got to resolve it. I can do so either by differentiating between P in the sense of P1 versus P in the sense of P2, in which case maybe P1 is true and not-P2 is also true; or by noting that P was true at time T1 and not-P was true at time T2; or by conceding that I was wrong in one of those two beliefs. Try as I might, I am unable to believe P and not-P are both true at the same time in the same way. I don't imagine you or anyone else could do so either.
Likewise, I'm unable to doubt that I sense the things that I sense. That is, I most definitely see this monitor and feel these keys. I experience what I experience. As for why, what purpose or meaning underlies those experiences... that's just asking why the world exists, why there is something rather than nothing. That's no more answerable than "why does logic work the way it does?". A sensible world exists, which is just to say that I have sensations. That cannot be questioned. Everything else is just finding patterns in those experiences. I can doubt that what I am sensing "really is" what I think I am sensing, in the sense that my theories about the world may be entirely wrong. I might be a hallucinating brain in a vat in a dream of the Matrix. That's one possible explanation for why I experience what I do. It doesn't seem necessary to posit such a scenario to explain the patterns in my experiences, so I don't, but given certain unlikely future experiences it might be necessary. One way or another, the only clues I have to how the "real world" is, aside from logic, come from my senses.
Everything else I can doubt. I can doubt the word of some man or some book, or my own explanations of things, or any *particular* explanation derived from logic an
My god is the philosophy of epistemology -- the study of what, if anything, we can know.
The scientific method is really just an epistemological theory. The correct one, in my estimation: that what we can known is simply what we can sense, and what we can derive from those sensed facts. But it's good to try to question it. To do so (and fail) leaves one's "faith" in the scientific method better justified.
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
And lets not forget those unknown knowns - those things we know but are not aware of knowing, either in the form of deep-seated implicit premises that are so obvious and apparent that we all take them for granted without consciously thinking of them, or things logically deducible from premises we already know. I'm thinking things like the geometry Socrates "taught" to Meno's slave boy. Merely asking him questions lead the boy to realize facts that he already essentially knew.
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To talk a bit more about humanity's being special, its in large part in the brain. I would wager that almost every other bioligical system we have is bested by others in the animal kingdom. The brain turned adaptability from hardware to software. With a brain that can reason, the long process of evoultionary selection is not so necessary for short term environmental changes. Some of the environmental changes can be compensated for be behavioral (software) changes. This gives our species orders of magnitude greater adaptability.
By the way... forgot to say that I agree with you here completely.
Yes, but most biological systems come at a price. To continue with the gills analogy, a fish with even better gills than the versatile fish could cause extiniction of the more adaptable fish. Adaptability is important, but in the short run may make no difference to other organisms that use their biological resources more directly to the current environment, its a balance of both.
Agreed. See some of my replies to other replies to my post. Being generally fit and adaptable isn't a guarantee of your survival, but it puts the odds in your favor overall, even if they're against you in some specific environment. And as I said in my original post, generalist species can't just be jacks of all trades, but must become aces of many as well, in order to survive. The odds against that occurring are low but possible, and if it did occur it would be a huge advantage. That's all I'm saying. That an "ace of many trades" is objectively better than an "ace of one trade".
Bacteria win by biomass, adaptability, number, diversity of environments occupied, etc. It is the multicellular organisms that are highly specialized to niches and fragile in comparison.
Agreed, in general. I'm not trying to say that humans are the top of the evolutionary ladder. But there's one advantage I've already mentioned that we may have (time will tell) over any other species here. We may be able to leave the Earth at will. In that regard, we can occupy a far greater range of environments than even bacteria, which are limited to this Earth (except for a few types of spore that can survive in vacuum, but then they rely on chance impacts - or rides on human vessels - to get them into space in the first place).
In general I would agree with you, that being in a low, stable position is usually better. Bacteria will far outlast most everything else around, on a geological timescale.
But there is one circumstance that I can foresee where plants may eventually need humans. One that I've already mentioned. On an even grander timescale.
This planet won't last forever. Stars burn out eventually. Humans need plants to survive in general, but in the long run, plants (and all other life on this rock) may need humans for their own survival as well.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but you haven't convinced me enough to overcome my skepticism. If you really claim there is an objective criteria, come up with the numbers. What quality can we measure and turn into quantity? If you want to claim objectivity, we are talking about measurement and numbers.
I'm not sure how you would quantify it precisely, but the quality to be measured would be the sum of fitness-for-a-certain-environment measurements, for all possible environments. Say for example, you have ten possible environments, and one species has a fitness measure of "10" for one of them and "1" for the other nine. Another species has a fitness measure of "5" for all ten environments. The latter would be more fit - a score of 50 versus 19. It doesn't mean that the second will definitely outlive the first, say if they happen to be competing in the environment where the first is a "10". But the odds overall are in favor of the second.
As far as 'fitness' or 'superiorty', you're delving into teleology there. I'm very keen on hearing your argument as to why reproducing is 'better', in any objective, scientific sense, than going extinct. My first inclination is to think that it is a recapitulation of the Biblical commandment to "go forth and multiply", a value that has so permeated our culture.
In evolutionary terminology, fitness is *defined as* ability to reproduce successfully. I'm just working within that definition. (Though to go off on a wild tangent, I would make an argument that the proper definition of "good" in a general philosophical sense is closely related. But that'd be going way off topic).
Good point. However, this is more or less what I was getting at with the phrase "survival of the fittest for a certain environment" bit.
That's specifically the point I was further qualifying though. That a species which is fit for MANY environments is overall more fit than a species which is fit only for one small niche environment.
Plus, it's worth noting that not all evolutionary progress pays off. To get back to your own counterpoint about amphibious fish surviving when the pond dries up, those same fish would be a less successful species right up until the point where the water based life dies. They'd probably be a marginal species that outlives the specialists by a stroke of luck.
That makes the assumption that, in addition to the advantages of amphibiousness, said fish species also has other disadvantages in the aquatic environment. I'll certainly agree that it seems *unlikely* for one species to have all the advantages (or competitively equivalent advantages) of an aquatic specialist species in addition to further adaptations that allow it to live on land, and as such, marginal species are usually out-competed by specialists on either side of the margin. But it's not impossible that you could have a species which is very successful in the water and also at least capable on the land. It's highly improbable that such a species would evolve, but then advantageous mutations are always improbable. Nevertheless, should such a creature by chance evolve, it seems that it would be a more fit species than a purely aquatic species, all other things being equal.
In other words, a species which is as fit to survive in many environments as other species are to survive in just one environment, is more fit overall. But the odds of such a species evolving in the first place are low. Which is just to say that phenomenal success is rare. I don't think any of that is in question.
Often the generalists outlive the specialists, and humans are definately in the specialist category (we're completely dependant on man-made tools to survive).
How does being dependent on oneself make one a specialist? I'd consider it just the opposite. The species discussed in TFA is completely dependant on it's "genetic swiss army knife" for it's survival, but that "swiss army knife" is very adaptable and carried with it everywhere it goes, which makes that species very adaptable and thus highly fit to survive. Likewise, humans are completely dependent on the products of our intellect for our survival in most environments, but we carry that intellect with us everywhere we go, it's a part of us, so the flexibility that that intellectual power grants us, makes us a flexible and adaptable and thus highly fit species.
However, I completely agree with you that generalists tend to outlive specialists. In fact that's my entire point. Generalists are more adaptable, more fit to survive in many environments, and thus more fit overall - more likely to outlive more specialized species.
In actuallity, survival of the fittest implies fittness for a certain environment only. To borrow someone else's analogy, you can have the best gills in the pond and you'll still die off with the rest if the pond dries up.
It's always seemed to me that there *is* an objective criterion for superiority in a species. Since we're judging superiority as fitness or the ability for a certain pattern (the genome) to continue propagating, then the superior species would be that one most able to overcome a greater variety of possible roadblocks to it's survival. To use your analogy, an amphibious fish, with watertight skin that can also breath air, would be objectively better by these criteria because it doesn't need the pond. It can live on land if need be.
In short, adaptability is what makes a species "superior". This is what has made homo sapiens the dominant large animal species on the planet - our intelligence has allowed us to adapt to damn near every (land) niche on the planet. Rats are a highly fit species for this same reason, as are cockroaches, and many fungi and microorganisms. All of these species are well-rounded and adaptable. (And by this criteria, this new species featured in TFA is likewise highly advanced). The one thing that I can see possibly giving mankind an edge up out of that group is our ability to radically change and even create environments around us, most notably including the ability to leave this planet of our own volition. (While some spores can survive in space, they couldn't just pack up and leave when the sun goes Red Giant on us all. We might be able to).
And since highly adaptable species are more fit to survive over longer periods of time, then evolutionary pressure *will* tend to select for them. And in that sense there is a sort of teleology to evolution: over time, as environments change back and forth and around to a variety of different extremes, the most flexible, adaptable, and generally well-rounded species will tend to outlive the rest. To survive in particular niches against competition from species specialized to those niches, they will have to become more capable in many areas as well; not simply jacks of all trades, but also aces of many.
You're certainly right that the old concepts of some sort of linear progression culminating in mankind are inaccurate. But that doesn't mean you have to deny any sort of progression, or any sort of objective criteria for discerning superiority or fitness between species.
Apple's Newton OS had a persistent object oriented database storage system, rather than a filing system. Changes to things would get frequently written to the database, so you never had to remember to save anything.
I like the idea of having data automatically stored as you enter it, but then saving also has the advantage of allowing you to revert something to the last saved version if you don't like the changes you've made, etc. I know that persistent infinite undo/redo would allow this as well, but in the just-for-the-hell-of-it studies in UI/OS design I've done, I like to have in-file versioning which preserves some of the traditional elements of "saving". There would always be a "working" version of the file auto-saved. Then the "Save" command would commit the current working version's changes to the last saved version. "Save As...", instead of saving a copy under a different name, saves as a new version of the file, preserving the previous version as it was before edits and committing the changes made to the working version to a new version of the file (with a prompt to name/number that version). There would of course be corresponding "Revert" (to last saved version) and "Revert To..." (some specified earlier version) commands as well.
The notepad application supported multiple types of stationary, and this was expandable. Indeed many applications could be similarly extended, such as the address book and calendar.
Do you know if the Newton technology was at all related to OpenDoc? They were contemporary projects, so I would imagine so...
Sounds like I would like it. But then, what I'd really like is a document-centric system where there is no such thing as "saving" a new document, only saving changes to an existing one. The kind of system where the first thing you do is create a file where you want it and called what you like, then open that and edit it.
The fact is, making something "user friendly" means making the front-end more simple -- and thus making the back-end more complicated. But this complexity always eventually compounds and compounds until the end user can't understand what's happening and gets confused. In the end, we learn that computers are easier to use if you understand the back-end, and that can only happen if you use a minimum of metaphor. That is-- a straight-forward system that is obvious and transparent.
While I agree completely with the point you're making, the first sentence of this paragraph seems to contradict it. Unless you just mean that when people *commonly speak of* making things "user friendly", they're talking about hiding things for the sake of simplicity while actually adding complexity. But that's certainly not the way it has to be, which seems to be the overarching point you're making.
People (users and programmers) seem to think that making something user-friendly involves hiding complexity behind some kind of "wizard" or cheesy metaphor, because the legacy systems underlying most computers in the world and irreversibly complex kludges full of inconsistencies and weird hacks. When you have a very complex system with lots of little rules and exceptions to those rules, it's damn near impossible to make that "user friendly" without hiding it all under the rug.
Instead, the better approach - though I understand why it's largely impractical for reasons of backwards compatibility - is just to have the underlying system less complex to begin with, and then let the users look "directly" at that - whether that be via GUI or CLI doesn't matter. Have the underlying system operate according to the smallest number of rules that can be consistently adhered to while still achieving the necessary functionality, and then present the operation of those rules to the user in the clearest and most consistent manner possible. Maybe attach a metaphor to each rule (e.g. the "directories are like folders, disks are like filing cabinets" analogy works well), but make sure that there's a 1:1 correlation between metaphorical objects and the "real" (logical) objects dealt with by the computer.
For an example of how NOT to do things... One of my biggest complaints about Apple's declining UI standards (which used to be top-notch) has been the way that iPhoto organizes it's albums (or at least used to... I've been told this is different in newer versions, but haven't confirmed that). When you create an album in iPhoto, and move your photos into there, it's not actually creating a folder on the HD and moving or even copying your photos into that. The iPhoto album grouping is contained entirely in iPhoto. This means that if I want to send someone an album, I can't just zip some folder in my iPhoto library and send it... I've got to go into iPhoto and "export" those photos. (This has the further fault, aside from not accurately mapping metaphor onto what's really happening with the data, of reinforcing the false notion that files are "in" programs. I get so tired of users telling me, when asked where such-and-such file is, that it's "in Word". I'd go so far as to abolish all Open dialogs if it'd make users realize there's a structure on their disk organizing their files, and that files don't live inside of programs).
So yeah. Metaphors aren't bad, so long as the metaphor accurately maps on to what's really happening - i.e. so long as the system is transparent. If you've got a very complex system underneath, making it transparent is going to make it user-unfriendly. But hiding what's really going on will also make it user-unfriendly, for the reasons you stated in the quoted paragraph. So your only solution is to have the underlying system itself be simple, but flexible and thus powerful, and then present that simplicity transparently to the user. Then your users won't have much to learn, and once they've learned those few rules, the entire possible realm of functionality in the system will be at their fingertips.
Why did you post that in reply to the parent's facetious post? I'm seeing more and more of this on Slashdot and it's a serious annoyance. The mod system isn't terrible and if your post is good enough it will get modded up. However if your post is a mediorce one piggybacked on a funny first post, that will get modded up in preference to a potentially better one below.
Couldn't you have just started a new thread instead of piggybacking on the funny post? People read those you know.
I used to do this as well, because the top-level "reply" button was not immediately obvious, at least not as obvious as the "Reply to This" links below each message. Maybe the person you're responding to is just having the same navigational difficulties that I once did.
While I won't say anything bad about System Shock or Shodan as a character, I've one minor gripe with this summary. Certainly depth and complexity the likes of which are described here is rare in a video game character, I must object to the phrase "a truly unique character" with one simple retort:
*cough*Durandal*cough*.
For the first nanosecond after the big bang, the rules of physic were different, but very unstable.
The laws of physics cannot change. Otherwise they wouldn't be laws.
The variables can change, but the equations stay the same. If it was possible for mass-energy to be created or destroyed under some circumstances in the past, then it's possible for it to be created or destroyed under similar circumstances in the future. But that's not what the laws of physics as we presently understand them say. There's no special exceptions that say mass-energy is conserved under *almost all* circumstances, except when such-and-such variables get to extreme values. It's just conserved. Always.
Of course, none of that is to say that what we currently think are "the laws of physics" are the real, eternal laws of physics. We thought Newton was dead on for a long time before realizing his calculations don't always work in certain extreme circumstances.
That's actually my own argument against closed loops, leaving only infinity as possibility; though people generally acknowledged as smarter than me (i.e. professors) have argued against me that I just don't understand enough math to grok why closed loops work, but I don't really buy that line.
The same argument works against creationist theories (not necessarily in the Biblical sense, though it works there too; but I'm including "the Big Bang was the start of all existence" as a creationist theory). It's late and I probably shouldn't be writing and you're an anonymous coward anyway so likely nobody will read this, but the jist of it is sort of a twist on the old "First Mover" argument for God's existence. We've got this finite amount of space and time we're aware of. Where did it come from? You give some explanation... where did the thing that explains it come from? If you work it around to some loop, you're now thinking in, essentially, higher-dimensional space; imagining the loop existing within some larger framework, so then you can ask (as you essentially did) what else is in that larger framework besides the loop we've established? Where did that larger framework (essentially, a "larger universe") come from? What created it?
That was a really bad summary, maybe I'll clarify later if anybody cares, but the point I'm trying to make is that when it comes down to it you need at least one infinite eternal thing in your explanation to serve as a backdrop against which everything else is painted. Medieval Christian philosophers used this to prove God's existence: "God" is that one infinite thing that has always been and always will be. I don't entirely disagree with that, but that's just because I hold that the universe is God. "The universe" is by definition all of existence, so if God exists then he is either some part of existence - which could work for older polytheistic notions of gods, but not for one great all-powerful God - or God is the sum of all existence. God is the universe. And since you need something infinite in any complete explanation, and nothing in the universe is infinite or eternal (otherwise it'd be the only thing in the universe), and the notion of "beyond the universe" is nonsensical, then the universe itself must be that infinite eternal thing.
It's a good thing not even one pico-joule of energy has been created from nothing in the history of the universe, otherwise we might be here to appreciate this invention.
This is my favorite way of proving that time is infinite or at least a closed loop.
Mass-energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This means it never will be created or destroyed and never has been created or destroyed. Thus, is mass-energy has never been created, then either there is none (demonstrably false), or it has always existed back infinitely.
There cannot have been a "creation" of the universe. There could be a point back in history beyond which we are unable to observe, and everything which we can observe could have originated from that point, but there was still something before that, and there may still be plenty beyond the observable universe.
And what of the things that are just know, i.e. your "logic". Neither proven nor provable, nor able to be disproven. Meaningless?
Logic isn't some sort of fact to be proven or disproven, believed or disbelieved. Logic is the method of proof. Logic is just how thought works. THAT logic is how thought works is just an undeniable truth the same as the fact THAT I can see and hear and that's how my senses work. It's the higher-level facts about the the world which build upon those sorts of undeniable truths which I was categorizing into disprovable, provable and meaningless.
Really, is that how it happens? You're sitting, thinking your calm, and you heartbeat gets fast, you notice hairs standing up, and you go, "Oh, wow, I think I'm afraid. How interesting. I wouldn't have noticed if not for the hairs standing up and the racing pulse." Or do you just feel fear? Isn't fear its own feeling, independant of any of the physical phenomena which might accompany it? Could you be afraid without hairs standing up, for example? Without your heart beating faster? So what is it that truly demonstrates to you that you're afraid?
Like I said, it's a subtle and complex sensation which most people don't bother to break down into it's constituent parts. I don't notice each individual thing happening at once and then conclude from that that I must be afraid - I notice this set of things happening in my body which together we call "fear". But if those things weren't happening, I wouldn't be inclined to say I was afraid. I might be cautious, which is to say I might carefully consider apparent dangers, but if I'm not having that physiological reaction, I don't really see how you could call that "fear".
Also, do you need to prove that you're afraid, and can you prove that you're not, or do you simply know?
Again, as I said, it's just an observation. It's one of those undeniable truths - like the fact that I'm seeing an image which I call a "computer monitor" right now - from which proofs are built. (I assume you're using the strict logical sense of proof, whether deductive or inductive; not the looser sense that I have used at points which includes direct observation itself). So no, you don't need to prove it, in that sense. In the looser sense I used earlier, then yes, you do, but "proving" it is as simple as observing that it is so. There's no work to be done.
I don't mean to be condescending, but you see what's happening? You're trying to explain something to me as though you have all the answers and I don't, and I'm trying to explain something to you as though you're the student. Your sense that I'm being condescending comes from the fact that you believe that you know more and that I have no right to play the part of the teacher, which is equally condescending. Maybe in this fact we are equals.
I'd like to suggest that you be more ready to play the student, since that's when you're more likely to learn something. When you assume that you know more than the person with whom you're speaking, it only leaves you open to lecturing. However, what I just wrote will probably seem condescending.
I'm not even looking at this from a perspective or who knows more or less. It's not an antagonistic debate to me, about proving one person right or wrong. It's just a chat. A dialogue. The things you say make me rethink my own thoughts so I can try to rephrase them to you in a way that you will see that they are obviously true - that is, that you already agree, or at least that agreement follows from earlier premises that we already agree upon, once you get what it is that I was trying to say. I'd only expect you to do the same thing back: try to restate your opinion in a way that that I will see that it's obviously true (though you don't really need to do so, since I don't disagree with you). All philosophy (as a process) really is is clearing up our thoughts and our words - the premises that it relies upon are just those things that are intuitively obvious to everyone, so the
Well, again, i think we differ on how we can talk about this. I'm not sure the degree to which we actually disagree.
/. before).
I never assumed we did. At least I haven't disagreed with anything you've said, rather just tried to clarify what I said so that you can see that we're essentially in agreement already.
I'd be tempted to ask (hypothetically) what you would do if you felt compelled to believe something that could not be systematized into a logical/scientific framework? Where would your loyalty lie, towards truth or logic? It sounds, however, that you're inclined to say that the truth that couldn't be systematized would still be "logic", which I don't follow.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by a truth that could not be systematized. There are of course things which I'm inclined to believe without having the full (pragmatic) ability to prove them systematically, yet still I'd hold that anything which is true *could* in principle be proven (or simply demonstrated), even if that would be very difficult for us (or I) to do at the moment. For example, I couldn't off of top of my head tell you how to prove that the Earth is round, but I believe that the Earth is round, and as I recall having seen a trigonometric method by which to prove that before, I'm pretty certain that it *could* be proven that the Earth is round.
Something that could be disproven clearly must be false (since you can't validly disprove something which is actually true). Something that could not be proven or disproven, even in principle, is meaningless, for it apparently has no effect on anything at all which we could check to see if it's true or not. Which just leaves things that *could be* proven as the truth. (Where "proof" here includes simple empirical demonstration).
"I'm afraid", for example, seems to be a statement that is neither logical nor illogical.
The recognition of one's own emotional states is just an empirical observation. One senses one's fear with the same tangible immediacy as one senses object via sight or touch or smell. I know when I'm afraid because my heartbeat gets fast and shallow, my hairs stand on end and I get a little numb, and various muscles in my body tense up. I can feel these things the same way I can feel the chair I'm sitting in now. I know that I'm sitting in a chair because I can feel it. I know when I'm afraid the exact same way. It's just a more a subtle and complex kind of sensation, and most people never break it down to all the particular bits that make it up like I just did. They just feel "fear".
So awareness of emotion isn't something that *needs* to be logically derived from empirical observations. It just *is* an empirical observation.
I think "God" is too big a topic to tackle before we have "being" and "knowledge" straight (or unless it comes up through other means). And I don't remember claiming to have a "God", but maybe your remembering a past conversation (I think we must have gotten into something on
The talk of God was just an example subject, something people wouldn't normally think of as a scientific thing. And "your" was being used rhetorically there; not "you, Nine-time's god...", but "anyone in particular's conception of God must be..." etc etc.
I'm not too interested in getting into a Socratic dialectic, though-- it requires too much, if you know what I mean. If I'm going to play the part of Socrates, for example, then I'd have to get you angry, which is too hard to do over the internet-- and not always fun.
I think you got a different impression of Socrates than I did. It seems to me that Socrates wasn't trying to piss people off - he just wound up stumping people, which has a tendency to piss people off. But making them angry wasn't a part of his plan, and seems to me that that kind of approach is completely antithetical to his methods. Emotional manipulation like that is something a Sophist would pull. Not Socrates.
And, no offense intended, but
In general, this last post makes me think that there are a lot of linguistic problems in our discussion.
I agree.
I've never read/met anyone involved in philosophy, for example, who would be willing to say that Kantian intuition is part of logic, but rather people might say that logic and mathematics are based on temporal/spacial intuition.
I'm not saying it's a part of logic. I'm saying they are essentially the same thing. This seems to be one of our points of confusion. I say that A just is B, you hear that A is justified by B, or based on B, or a kind of B, which isn't what I mean. For this example, I'm saying that logic is just a formalized/symbolized way of communicating intuitive (in the Kantian sense) truths, thus, when you are speaking of logic, you are simply speaking of intuition. A clearer (though not perfectly analogous) example might be that when you're talking about bachelors, you're just using that word 'bachelor' to refer to men who aren't married; and likewise (more analogously) when you're talking about "men" you're just talking about those things [gesturing at images of men]. Words all ultimately refer back to "images" (for lack of a better term for sense-data that encompasses all five senses, observed and imagined), or abstract elements of such "images". So logic is just spoken intuition, and likewise, intuition is just unspoken logic.
However, I'd agree that "truth" is necessarily bound up in intuition and sense (which I guess seems to be where you're going), but it's also bound to things like feeling and emotion. Those things are sometimes equally undeniable. Aristotle (who for many purposes should be considered the father of what people generally call "logic") said that logic itself was only to be believed because it elicited a feeling that it could not be denied (which is not to say that it was the only thing that could not be denied), and so other feelings which are also undeniable has equal share of truth.
In the philosophical system I'm writing up (I am a philosophy student, and am writing a book formalizing my system of philosophy), I speak of four different sources of ideas (which correspond to Kant's three kindas plus analytic a posteriori), and four different... I'm still trying to think of a proper term for them, but they're basically "kinds of 'action'", which correspond to those sources of ideas. With synthetic a posteriori (observation) goes actual action, physically doing things. With analytic a priori ("logic" in the symbolic, lingual sense) goes intention, the 'act' of conscious planning to do something. With analytic a posteriori (learning definitions via communication) goes declaration, the 'act' of asserting that something ought to be done, declaring it as a law or imperative. And with synthetic a priori (intuition) goes emotion, the 'act' of feeling, wanting, desiring something to be. So I would say that intuition *just is* the undeniable emotional feeling of truth. If it is an undeniable feeling that something must be true, in the fullest sense that you are utterly incapable - not just very unwilling - of imagining that it could not be so, then it just is intuition, and to communicate that formally just is logic. Anything less than that full undeniability is just "truthiness", and we all know the failings that relying on that can lead to.
Sometimes these truths are, however, what most people would call "illogical". Hell, sometimes those truths are downright crazy, and still manage to be true.
Care to name some? I can't imagine anything that I could have a truly undeniable (see above qualifications) feeling of truth about that I would call "illogical" or "crazy". Then again, I'm not most people.
It'd take us a lot more discussion, I think, before we'd get very far in this, but the great failing of many philosophers (especially modern, post-"scientific method" philosophy) is an unwillingness to talk about anything that cannot be driven through a mathmatical proof of some kind.
I'm ful
Is it the same to say, "I know faith works because it would be faithless for it not to"? What's the difference between that and what you said?
Because it's possible to not have faith in something, therefore just the fact that you have faith in something doesn't make it true. I can choose to believe something on faith or not. But it's not possible to think an illogical thought (again, at least not for me, and my own mind the only one I can really talk about). I can think two separate thoughts which contradict each other, but I can't simultaneously think them both, no matter how much I might want to. The closest I could do is set up careful mental blocks to never consider them both at the same time, or fiddle with what I mean by both terms so they're not actually contradictory at all. The latter is actually a quite useful dialectical tool for reconciling opposing viewpoints.
See, there's not even a logical problem in saying, "It would be illogical for logic to fail to 'work', but it doesn't work." You see, because if it doesn't 'work', then there's no logical problem in truth being "illogical".
That's (ironically) logically correct, but there's still the problem of illogical things being inconceivable and thus impossible. Square circles can't exist, because... what the hell is a square circle? I can't even imagine what that might be, because it's an illogical, contradictory thing... unless you fudge the meanings of "square" and "circle" in which case you could get a rounded rectangle or something. Reality must be logical because for it to be otherwise is inconceivable, and I don't mean in the Vizzini sense of the word. And that's all that logic deals with, the conceivable and the inconceivable, the possible and the impossible. Illogical things are, by definition, logically impossible.
You see, because if the impossible is possible, then there's no problem in truth possibly being "impossible".
Exactly. And you can dig deeper than empiricism. There's lots of philosophical writing on this. If you want something explicit, though overly-simplistic, check out Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Whole big chuncks are about why empiricism fails us. There are better works on the subject, but they're generally less straight-forward. Plato's Theatetus, for example, is a great piece on the foundation of knowledge, but you have to know how to read Plato if you want to get anywhere.
I've read Kant, though it's been a while now. I'm quite fond of his transcendental idealism and my own views are quite similar to his. You'll note that I've already said much about experiences and the relations between them being the fundamental building blocks of "reality" - the "noumenal" world is just an imaginary thing that we assume exists, and what we think it is like is just a reasoned extrapolation from our experiences. I don't think I've read Theatetus, but I read a lot of Plato a long time ago so I might have just forgotten it.
I get the feeling that what you're nudging at is something like what Kant called "intuition" (which is a term I also use in a similar way in my own formal writing, though I've been using it in the more colloquial sense here). And I guess my response is that I'm including that category of thought under what I've been calling "logic", by which I really mean a priori reasoning in general, not necessarily logic in the formal, symbolic, linguistic sense. The way I look at things, formal logic and mathematics, once you fill in the variables, simply refers to "intuitive" concepts, by which I mean basically imagination, internal visualization. For example: logically, if no A's are B's, something cannot be both an A and a B. Fill in the blanks: since squares and circles are completely exclusive sets of shapes, nothing can be a square circle. This just means that I can't imagine, conceive of or visualize something that matches both the definition of a square and a circle. Likewise with math: 2 + 2 = 4 just means that if I imagine two things, and another two things, and
Well, exactly, it either leads to infinite regression, which leads to the volatilization of all truth and knowledge, or declaration of something as unquestionable. Obviously, something must be unquestionable if you ever want to claim hold of anything as "true", however, you cannot declare that thing to be unquestionable by virtue of scientific reasoning. It must be something that is unquestionable because you know it through a faculty that is both immediate and unquestionable.
What I'm saying is that scientific reasoning *just is* reliance upon those immediate and unquestionable faculties. Those immediate and unquestionable faculties *are* logic and my senses. I know they work because they say they work and I'm unable to conceive of them possibly not working. I know logic works because it would be illogical for it not to. I know my senses work because I sense things. These faculties are the only things I can't find a way to doubt; they are the most immediate and unquestionable aspects of myself and the world; and to rely on them as the ultimate grounds for justification is all it means to think scientifically.
The alternative? You have to accept that you have no grounding for knowledge. You don't even have a grounding for an approximation of uncertain knowledge. You just have no grounding whatsoever, to the degree that you cannot even claim to lack grounding, because you need some grounds on which to base that claim. You don't really want to be there.
This term "ground" made me think of a nice metaphor. Critical philosophy, the method of doubt, the scientific method, all work by first digging "down", trying to disprove and doubt everything possible, and then building "up", deriving conclusions from whatever survives the criticism. The metaphor that I thought of is that "the deeper you dig, the stronger your foundation". And it certainly seems like rational empiricism is "hitting bedrock". But who knows? Maybe there is something deeper than that. But we can't seem to dig any further, so that is where we lay our foundation. Yet still, if we ever were to figure out how to dig deeper than that, then *that* would be a better place to lay our foundation.
You're right that you need a foundation to build on, but it's not certain that there is any natural, ultimate foundation, i.e. "bedrock". Maybe you just lay your foundation as deep as you can and build up from there, but there is no bottom, only deeper and harder rock. We can't really know either way; all we can know is "this is as deep as we can go". And for all intents and purposes, that's the bottom, and anything that builds up from that is "true".
Even if all that were possible, it still leaves you with no knowledge. None. Whatsoever. Any given statement only falls into "disproven" or "yet to be disproven", but never "true". And that's after you've already assumed true (on faith, if not knowledge, and you're saying you can't have knowledge) that cynicism is the road to truth. Yet this cynicism never gets you to truth.
Criticism, not cynicism. I'm not denying the ability to reach the truth, just giving a theory/description/definition of what qualifies as "true". Anything that cannot be doubted is true, necessarily so, because it's not conceivable that it could be false (which is why we can't doubt it); and anything that necessarily follows (i.e. can be proven) from those truths is also true. Conversely, anything which can be doubted, and anything that cannot be proven without those doubtable things taken for granted, should be assumed false. And of course, anything that flatly contradicts something that can be proven true from indubitable premises is certainly false.
Predictive theories, as most scientific theories are, are a bit fuzzier, because they deal with inductive premises, "this seems to be true": noticing a pattern in a big series of indubitable truths (individual observations), and assuming that that pattern continues. The conclusions they derive are thus never absolutely certain, merely extreme
The problem you're describing just leads to the regress argument. How do you justify what it is you used to justify the use of logic and senses? And then how do you justify THAT? It leads to either an infinite regress, the declaration of some thing as unquestionably foundational, or circular self-supporting coherentism.
What I'm saying is that you don't exactly justify anything, at least not at the deepest level. You criticise everything, try to call into doubt all you can, and then use whatever holds up to criticism as your "foundation", and from there you can justify other things. And again, the scientific method has this embedded in itself, with the notion that you can never prove (completely justify) a theory, but rather just disprove or fail to disprove a theory. Theories that hold up well to criticism are used and considered "true", or at least "truer" than less resilient theories. The reliance on senses and logic as an epistemological theory is no different.
Now maybe this criticism thing is the deeper justification you were talking about, but to think of it as a justification is to fall back into regress again, and defy the very notion of critical philosophy.
This form of knowledge is better and more certain than that gained through 'science', because 'science' gains it's certainty though this knowledge, not the other way around.
And I'm saying that science - as in the methodology of science, not any particular body of scientific theories - is identical with those "other" ways of knowledge. The only things I can't doubt are logic and my senses, so they are the foundation of all certainty and thus knowledge. The scientific method just says "apply logic to your senses, and repeat". It's the same way of knowing.
If by "science" you mean not the methodology, but rather "scientific theories", then you're right. Any particular scientific theory is founded on this deeper way of knowing, so my knowledge of the theory of gravity or the theory of electromagnetism are founded on those deeper sources, logic and my senses. But that's just to say that they're founded on the scientific method. That's all a scientific theory is: a story that is logically consistent with itself, and thus far consistent with our senses (which also excludes talk of things that could not, in principle, be empirically verified or sensed, like "God" or "souls", by the common definitions thereof; or Platonic "forms", or Kant's "noumenal" world).
Any other sort of appeal to "science", along the lines of "that can't be right because it contradicts the predictions/mechanisms of such-and-such theory" (rather than the observations which support that theory, which would be a valid appeal to science), isn't really an appeal to science at all. It's an appeal to the religion of Scientism, that is, the blind faith that what Scientists say is true, as congregations follow their preachers or disciples their gurus. You know, those Scientists people are always talking about, when they say "Scientists have discovered that..." or "Scientists say...". That, I think, is why religious folk are often to averse to science. They see it as just another bunch of explanations, a competing religion, and miss that what makes it special is the methodology that justifies those explanations. The explanations (theories) themselves are just our best working hypotheses and can and will change as they have in the past.
Unfortunately it seems that a lot of common "science-minded" (i.e. non-traditionally-religious) people actually do just believe science on blind faith in scientists and don't understand the methodology either. Accepting theories partially on faith isn't so bad for most people, to whom the precise way that gravity or quantum electrodynamics or evolution works doesn't matter to them, so long as someone else who can make productive use of such knowledge understands it properly. But it's an important general life skill to understand the methodology of science, and critical thinking in general. It makes people better able to adapt to a changing world, and keeps them from being manipulated with lies and misdirection. That's why science matters. Today's theories are just today's theories and in three hundred years we'll look like foolish children for believing them, but (assuming for the sake of argument that we don't fall into a new Dark Age) our descendants then will be able to see why we could think such things, given the limited data we've got now, because the methodology is timeless.
The scientific method is mere refinement to the same kind of thinking that the great philosophers of the ancient world used - namely, restricting the domain of what we reason about to things we can observe, rather than just reasoning off of people's common intuitions. Even then, a lot of the great old philosophers did constrain themselves largely to the sensible world. Then we fell into a dark age of thinking that truth was a function of what people believed, rather than the other way around. In that dark age, governments were monarchial, so the truth was whatever the king said it was. In the new dark age we're heading into, we've still got that threat, plus a new, more democratic kind of faulty thinking: this noti
On a related note, ever notice how all the research and development facilities in the United States are in the West and the South (the land of the troglodytes), away from the vaunted Ivy-League colleges of the East coast, the land of the enlightened?
I'll grant you most of the snobby elitism I hear comes from this "Ivy League" place back east, but since when is the west considered a land of "troglodytes"? I have of course heard the stereotype of the ignorant southerner before, and much about the inland states as well (which maybe you mean by "west"? there's another half a continent out past that you know), but I've never heard anything comparable about the west coast. Maybe there's bias in the opinions I come across since I live out here in California, but I've not heard such a stereotype in the internet before either.
Isn't that a bit loose? Obviously, the scientific method isn't a theory at all, it's just a method.
I didn't mean theory in the scientific sense. I was actually searching for another word, but failed to come up with one. The belief/hypothesis/pick-your-term that the scientific method is "the right method" (yes, I am struggling for appropriate words here) is an epistemological theory (again, not in the scientific sense). It's nothing but a statement of empiricism: that all knowledge derives from reasoning about our sensations. The scientific method is just a decree to act on the advice that follows from that epistemological theory... namely, "make observations, derive reasoned conclusions from them, and repeat indefinitely".
You seem to have adopted an epistemological theory that knowledge can only be attained through this one particular method, which is obviously false. After all, what in our senses could have taught us to trust this method?
You're either asking how one would learn what is the correct theory of epistemology, or how one would come to believe a particular theory of epistemology. The answer to the first question is itself an epistemological question, for epistemology deals with knowledge, i.e. JUSTIFIED belief. I don't know the answer to that, and you're right that any attempt to answer it would be circular. To justify a belief in a theory of epistemology would require that you already take some epistemological theory for granted. Which is why I don't try to justify any theory of epistemology but rather try to call into question all epistemological theories and see what holds up. Which is also why the answer to the second question is easy. I believe that empiricism is the correct theory of epistemology because I am unable to do otherwise, no matter how I might try.
It is undeniably apparent that that "logic works" (again struggling for words here), because logic is just how the mind works. My mind at least - I don't know for sure if there are any others, much less how they work, so mine's the only thing I've got to go on. I cannot simultaneously think that P and not-P are true at the same time and in the same way. I might at one time think that P is true, and then at another time think that not-P is true, but if such a contradiction is presented to me, I've got to resolve it. I can do so either by differentiating between P in the sense of P1 versus P in the sense of P2, in which case maybe P1 is true and not-P2 is also true; or by noting that P was true at time T1 and not-P was true at time T2; or by conceding that I was wrong in one of those two beliefs. Try as I might, I am unable to believe P and not-P are both true at the same time in the same way. I don't imagine you or anyone else could do so either.
Likewise, I'm unable to doubt that I sense the things that I sense. That is, I most definitely see this monitor and feel these keys. I experience what I experience. As for why, what purpose or meaning underlies those experiences... that's just asking why the world exists, why there is something rather than nothing. That's no more answerable than "why does logic work the way it does?". A sensible world exists, which is just to say that I have sensations. That cannot be questioned. Everything else is just finding patterns in those experiences. I can doubt that what I am sensing "really is" what I think I am sensing, in the sense that my theories about the world may be entirely wrong. I might be a hallucinating brain in a vat in a dream of the Matrix. That's one possible explanation for why I experience what I do. It doesn't seem necessary to posit such a scenario to explain the patterns in my experiences, so I don't, but given certain unlikely future experiences it might be necessary. One way or another, the only clues I have to how the "real world" is, aside from logic, come from my senses.
Everything else I can doubt. I can doubt the word of some man or some book, or my own explanations of things, or any *particular* explanation derived from logic an
My god is the philosophy of epistemology -- the study of what, if anything, we can know.
The scientific method is really just an epistemological theory. The correct one, in my estimation: that what we can known is simply what we can sense, and what we can derive from those sensed facts. But it's good to try to question it. To do so (and fail) leaves one's "faith" in the scientific method better justified.
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
And lets not forget those unknown knowns - those things we know but are not aware of knowing, either in the form of deep-seated implicit premises that are so obvious and apparent that we all take them for granted without consciously thinking of them, or things logically deducible from premises we already know. I'm thinking things like the geometry Socrates "taught" to Meno's slave boy. Merely asking him questions lead the boy to realize facts that he already essentially knew.