Oh please, you can't do good science if you're constantly blathering about how you're imperfect and this is just an approximation.
On the contrary- you can't do good science without it. In fact, I'd say knowing one's own limitations is the very definition of the difference between GOOD SCIENCE and BAD SCIENCE. Almost every example of bad science I can name (Young Earth Creationism, Hollow Earth Theory, and Wandering Planet Extinction come to mind immediately, though there are MANY others) all suffer from a lack of ability to admit that one is wrong, or potentially wrong. In fact, if science has any philosophical validity at all, it's that the scientific method, when properly applied, insists upon labeling imperfections, assumptions, and approximations.
I find your marginalization of all that we've accomplished tiring.
Just as I find your marginalization of the greater amount of accomplishment to be rather absurd at best. The difference though, is if you'd open your mind, you'd find that what I'm talking about isn't marginalization- it's just not putting it up on a pedestal for people to throw rocks at it.
But you side-stepped his request: prove that you cannot prove a negative.
His request was invalid based on an incomplete understanding of a negative. A negative is an event with zero probabilility. You can prove that a negative has never happened so far, but you can never prove that probability is exactly zero.
Science IS a philosophy- a highly successful philosophy, but still a philosophy. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news- but you might want to take a look at how science started. It wasn't called "Natural Philosophy" in the days of DaVinci and Galileo for nothing.
Come back when you understand what that is.
Come back when you have an appreciation for the limits of humanity instead of an arrogant belief in a cult.
Say I have a black box with a screen on it. Every second it displays either a 1 or a 0. There is no way to ever predict which of a 1 or 0 it will be ahead of time, but it is 1 50% of the time and 0 50% of the time (in the same way a dice is 1 1/6th of the time). But there is no possibility of the box exploding, or anything other than a 1 or 0 appearing. Such a thing is random by any definition I've seen, but does not make physics stop working, and that's the level of randomness we need. Science doesn't rely on the existence of random in the way you're defining it.
Sorry- in my line of work that's considered pseudorandom. At best, it can only create a 1 or a 0 in accordance with the way the black box was designed; the very fact that it cannot explode or do anything unexpected makes it non-random. Did I mention I'm a software engineer by trade- working entirely in software, the realm of thought?
I insist that it exists in the same way I'd insist gravity exists. No, we don't know it's there for certain, but the evidence is overwhelming.
And yet gravity is entirely indescernable from a perpetually expanding universe.
Our scientific model of the universe appears to approach the fact. We don't know this for certain, but with enough confidence to base decisions on what to teach on it.
And that's the very arrogance that leads you into the semantic mistake of claiming infalibility- of pretending to be certain when you are NOT.
Laws of physics can still hold, provided they cannot precisely predict the outcome.
The whole idea of a LAW of physics instead of a THEORY is that it DOES precisely predict the outcome, in every case.
If you're not going to accept the conventional meanings of the words in the English language, it's going to make it very hard to have a discussion.
English is a highly imprecise language- and conventional meanings of words bring with them the bias of the speaker. Philosophicaly a religion has been any given system of belief for a very long time- it's the only definition that actually covers ALL religions as opposed to only organized monothesitic and polytheistic religions, which are subsets of the whole.
You can call it that if you will, but why must such a God be intelligent?
Because, as I have shown above, and you agreed to above, an unintelligent God yeilds Laws that aren't Laws and facts that aren't fact- an unpredictable, supernatural universe.
Are you seriously claiming the function I just wrote down has an intelligent mind?
No, I'm seriously claiming that for finite meanings of the word intelligent, YOU have an intelligent mind- and thus the pseudorandom function you just wrote down has an intelligent mind *behind* it. This is true for every pseudorandom software function or set of hardware we can think of- something has to limit the randomness for it to be pseudorandom.
A belief in the simplest explanation for an observed phenomenon is in a different category from a belief based solely on the teachings of authority.
The problem there is the observation itself is only as accurate as the instruments observing it; and just as finite, local, and non-universal as the teachings of an authority. In fact, most teachings of authorities of any type are based on observation; which is what makes them inaccurate and inadequate to begin with.
Perhaps so, in which case my apologies. They're not infallible, merely vastly superior to any alternative.
No, in fact, they are exactly the same as all of the alternatives- mere opinion that is sometimes true and sometimes false. Arrogance will get you nowhere with me.
Because I'm getting irritated. You seem to be wilfully misunderstanding the concept of randomness.
The reason you're getting irritated is because you don't actually understand the concept of randomness- only pseudorandomness.
No no no, I congratulate *you*, noodly flipness, on the niche that you're building up, particularly in trying to get the last word in. *Your* post-modern religion is more than I can bear. Your dogma is a dogma all of it's speicial ownness. It seems to answer all the questions, except the one, where can I get funding or a decent paying job. I do believe there's a position for teaching philosophy 101 to grandmothers on the other side of Saturn, where the notions of reality, of time and being, of being and nothingness are discussed ad nauseaum.
Courts of law, user interface design, software engineering, art- there are plenty of places philosophy is useful. The scientific method itself was designed by philosophers. The idea that philosophy automatically leads to the poorhouse is based on an incomplete understanding of what philosophy is.
Dude: you want to find basic philosophical errors so badly it is somewhat funny.
Actually quite the reverse- I want people to tell the truth. If they KNOW something, I want that knowledge to be unchangeable, and if they're just telling me an opinion, I don't want them to use the word "KNOW".
I have no idea from where you conclude that there is an error: certainly nothing I said in that paragraph affords that conclusion.
The concept that something is irrelevant means that you are making a conscious decision to ignore evidence. Since you are not infalible and omniscient, you simply aren't qualified to make that decision, nobody is. Thus science is doomed to being forever wrong and incomplete.
I have no idea how you get from "science does not care who set up the constants" (because that is not its subject matter, but the subject matter of metaphisics or whatever) to "it is based on faith". Absolutely no idea.
If you don't care about a given set of data, you are taking it on faith that given set of data is truly irrelevant. How hard is this to understand?
You keep saying that, but it is 100% counterfactual.
If it was counterfactual, then there would be NOTHING, could be NOTHING irrelevant to science. All information, all evidence, true, false or otherwise, would need to be taken into account.
Science has most certainly and verifiably produced more that belief and tautologies. Look around you: the monitor, the plastic out of which your keyboard is made, the vaccines you've had as a child, the TV waves going through you, the fabric from which your cloths are made, your deodorant, the artifical flavour of the last piece of gum you had.
None of these are real outside of our belief that they are real. All you have stated here is that Science is the Religion that asserts that Reality is Real- which is a belief and a tautology. Just because something is based on faith does not automatically make it incorrect- but nor does it automatically make it correct, it's just another model of reality to consider.
Note that you are defining "structure" so as to exclude randomness... Of course you can do that, but then your statement becomes void.
Nice to know that you consider true statements to be void when they are inconvient to your beliefs- no different than any other fundamentalist.
I can only suggest that you study probability theory a bit: you'll immediately notice that randomness is in no way incompatible with the existence of "structure".
Only because probability theory is designed to say so. Proving a tautology with another tautology is not very useful.
Moreover, in most cases, randomness is just a convenient model devised to deal with "hidden variables", "macro-scale observations" &c. (There are interpretations of quantum mechanics in which randomness is a taken as intrinsic, but this is rather controversial) As such, its role is precisely to incorporate in our reasoning some kinds of lack of information.
And when you incoporate some kinds of lack of information into reasoning, that's called FAITH- that's exactly what faith is.
The precise meaning of "scientific fact" very crucially includes the fact that humans are finite. It is built in in the requirements of falsability, of reproducibility, and what not.
All of which, if you truly were including human finiteness into the equation, would merely be arbitrary rules for belief- dogma.
Of course! Anyone pretending that science is anything other that that is a liar.
And yet, we just had a judge claiming EXACTLY that- that disagreement with evolution is not allowed in classrooms in PA. The whole idea of allowing ID in the classroom is allowing disagreement.
Now, to be honest: I tend to be slightly demanding on the kind of disagreement I will pay attention to. In my experience, most disagreement arises from ignorance.
Even the ignorant may possess some data that the informed have overlooked- it's not safe to deny disagreement based only on ignorance.
A theorem isn't PROOF- it's based on unproven assumptions that haven't been shown not to be true yet.
PROOF would mean written in stone forever, infallible, something you can count on. I maintain you still can't have that- no human being can, we're simply incapable of it.
God IS in the gaps. He always has been. The gaps are just perpetually shrinking as science fills the gaps with explanations that prove things behave deterministically.:)
Exactly right. And as long as science limits itself to explainations that prove things behave deterministically, eventually God will no longer be the God of the gaps- but a very well defined something, defined by the very physical laws it/he/she/whatever created AND UNABLE OR UNWILLING TO DEFY THOSE LAWS. The great philosopher of our time, Kevin Smith, put it best in his screenplay Dogma- all of reality hinges on one important concept, that what God says is true. If it turns out that what God says, truly says not what other people say about him/her/it/whatever, is not true, then what we have is an indeterministic universe- at which point it all collapses, and NO physical laws exist.
Ah, my apologies for the semantical mis-step. I should not have implied that we had disproven every single possible 'hidden variable' theory, as it is possible that there is some underlying truth which gives the appearance of breaking all these rules while still, in fact, retaining them at some deeper level (much like how His Noodly Appendage is being obfuscated by this "evolution" business).
This is the exact real problem here- most scientific theories fall into the same semantical mis-step. This leads the religious bigots to accuse the scientific bigots of teaching atheism, and that's how we get into the whole mess. The obvious answer is to stop teaching science as fact- and start in middle school or earlier with the philosophical underpinnings of the scientific method and *why* they're assumed to be true, while NEVER actually claiming that they are true. Keep the magic in the system, there's no real need to expunge it.
Although I would note that, as far as I've seen, since the EPR 'paradox' was shown to in fact represent how the world works, hidden variable theories are not faring well - they involve giving up significant numbers of other aspects of our classical universe to retain the deterministic effects, and often introduce large amounts of additional cruft that doesn't lead to any useful predictions.
It is entirely possible we're too stupid to include enough variables- I remember when Star Trek tackled this in an episode, the holographic Einstein claimed it would require more than 21 dimensions to make sense of it. That's likely a low estimate. It's important to stay humble about all of this- arrogance is what leads us to the very semantic error you made above; and thus to the very argument we're discussing.
Actually, the other choice is not that it is quantum random, it is that _it doesn't matter_.
No, that's the cop-out that gets you out of caring. It's no more than an excuse for appealing to a higher athority.
Science is only concerned with things that are testable and observable.
Not always- just since people started giving the excuse "it doesn't matter" for not doing their jobs.
Science is agnostic (or even apatheist), but not inherently athiest. (though scientists themselves come in those and many othen varieties.)
Everybody brings their bias to the table; ignoring the bias doesn't help.
Also, there are many TOEs that don't involve randomness FYI. Randomness is an observed characteristic of quantum mechanics, the book is still out as to whether it is a defining one.
True enough- but all theories of evolution require variance within species and mutation to kick off the ability of a species to adapt. Species that don't have enough variance and mutation go extinct when their climate changes. This leads us to two untestible and unobservable conclusions: Something or someone set up the physical laws that lead to climate change, and something or someone is creating the pattern we view as random. Atheists say that something or someone is nothing- but that's just a belief as well, and thus religious. At this level of the explaination behind TOE, there's no escaping the religion, so might as well teach as many different religious theories as you can.
Don't go all philosophical on me: the point is, this is what we know now.
Philosophy is exactly the point. And knowledge indicates an accuracy and finalness wthat we can NEVER achieve. So it isn't what we "know" now, it's what we "think" now, a mere opinion that could change tomorrow given new evidence if we were open to new evidence. Which we're not, because we "know" instead of "think".
Yeah right. The fact is, when a molecule gets very cold, its location becomes fuzzy, hence the inherent property argument. Don't like it? Prove me wrong.
Just google Bose-Einstein condensation and look at the first link explaining the concept of absolute zero.
Okay then, go do your experiment and see if you can disprove Heisenberg. Also, make sure it can be repeated by somebody else.
You already suggested just such an experiment. However, repeatability is about as useful as the original observation- two fallible human beings seeing the same thing does not mean that they are seeing it accurately OR that their interpretation is the infallible truth.
Any statement of fact can be written in positive or negative form, so your statement simply says you can't prove anything at all. Positive: "I am going to the park today." Negative: "I am not going to remain outside the boundaries of the park today." Or more simply, "It is not true that it is not true that I am going to the park today."
Double negatives are not true negatives. So sorry, you lose on that one. Please try again.
You're seem to believe that the concept of randomness is anti-theistic, in which case your disagreement is with much, much, more than evolution. You couldn't possibly "lose" this argument, because you've already decided that observable evidence means nothing. In short, you're not talking about science.
Actually that's partially right. Actually, randomness is theistic- it presupposes an unintelligent god that we cannot predict. And the problem is far worse than "observable evidence means nothing" it's "the observer brings his bias to the observed".
The "who set up the universal constants" is a question which is completely irrelevant to science. It belongs to metaphysics, religion or---this is the candidate I'd favor---is essentially nonsensical.
And thus, science has a basic philosophical error in it- one which makes science into more faith than fact.
(Most of the proofs of existence of God and/or other similar stuff are based on arguments of infinite regression, like the one you are hinting at. I have failed, since I became aware of those arguments, that they prove not much more than the lack of imagination of the one using them. For example, in your case: why can it not be that universal constants are like they are just because they are? Or maybe because they cannot be otherwise?)
That too requires faith. You can't get away from it- science is a religion.
Science is merely interested in the fact that universal constants are as they are.
Yep, and as such, it will always remain based on belief and tautologies.
Introducing an agent assumed to have set the constants at the values they have, introduces in a big melodramatic move more problems than what it solves (it solves exactly zero problems...)
Actually, it solves quite a few problems- the problem of randomness for instance, as well as the problem of entropy.
I have no idea where you see this requirement come from.
Randomness requires a belief I do not share- the belief that there is no underlying structure to the universe.
The fact that something is complex by no means whatsoever requires that something else exist which can keep track of its complexity and/or control it.
And yet, we know of no other complexity, no other set of rules, that was not set up by an intelligent mind.
Well, there is no need in arguing that: that is essentially contained in the definitions of the words you are using. No one, absolutely no one, seriously pretends that humans are infinite, or that they can "get" anything 100% correctly, or anything remotely vaguely similar to that.
Actually, anybody who believes in scientific "fact" separate from God is seriously pretending that to a very large degree.
Indeed, it is not difficult to construe the scientific endeavor as precisely an attempt to do as much as is possible in the face of our finiteness.
Then we need to teach THAT- not facts written in stone that anybody who is brave enough to disagree with gets thrown out of the classroom for.
And so, out of your own mouth, you believe that all science is a waste of time, doomed to fail.
No- just the current incarnation of science is doomed to failure. The previous incarnation, the search for the mind of God, has made great progress. All the way to a theoretical limit beyond which we currently have no way to gain more information.
So basically, you were wrong but couldn't admit it?
No, it's far worse than that- basically we're ALL wrong and are incapable of being right, no matter what we come up with, so we might as well teach the kids everything we can possibly think of in hopes that one of them will be more right than we have been, thus advancing science in a way we haven't thought of yet.
That the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is an inherent trait of fundamental particles and not a problem of observation.
Or at least if you're as arrogant as Heisenberg and think you are God and infallible, then it's an inherent trait of fundamental particles and not your own stupidity. See previous statement. The fact that particles stop moving at a given temperature means absolutely nothing to measuring their velocity, other than the fact that one potential method of measuring their position is to reduce their velocity to 0.
No.
And yet:
No, you have average velocity, not instantaneous.
Heisenberg didn't say anything about averages vs instantaneous.
As far as we can tell the decisions are completely random.
Yes, so? All that means is that the human race is a bunch of idiots. We already knew that. "As far as we can tell" just means that from our perspective the decisions appear to be random. That doesn't mean that from ALL perspecitves the decisions are random.
There's no rhyme or reason that we can make out.
Once again, so what? This just proves that human beings are incapable of reasoning on the level of an omniscient being, or even on the level of a being more scient than we are. Also something we already knew- no need to make up some idea of "randomness" to explain it, just admit that we're not the final product of the evolution of either our science, our culture, or our species.
Of course that could mean we're simply unable to comprehend it, but it would have to be a very complex pattern, and there doesn't seem to be any reason for a very complex pattern to exist.
Once again, that's only from our point of view, which is rather finite and limited.
Anyway, the numbers look random to us - so how would it ruin our theories if they truly were random?
True randomness would mean it's entirely outside of natural phenomena; beyond the ken of even an omniscient being. At which point, no possible laws could be discovered. No probability estimates would hold. Nothing could be predicted at all. Truly random means no rules.
Any scientific conclusion is only our current working model of the universe. You could have done thousands of careful experiments about how forces and acceleration work and then try and apply them to a speeding electron and get an answer that's entirely off-base. Science cannot and doesn't try to predict things with 100% accuracy.
And yet above, you arrogantly insist that randomness exists- not seeing the potential error in that.
However, I don't think you can deny that scientific predictions have been and are useful.
I agree they've been useful- but useful and accurate are two different things, as are fact and theory. No model actually approaches fact, so why claim to be teaching fact?
You appear to be using a different definition of "random" to everyone else.
Nope, same one. A random event is unpredictable in all frames of reference. That means that laws of physics do not hold for random events.
Not religion as it's conventionally defined.
I'm not, and have never been, conventional. A religion is just a system of belief, a model to explain the universe.
You can class me as believing in some mysterious generator that spits out numbers if you like, but that's in the same field as believing in some mysterious force that attracts massive objects towards each other.
Yep, exactly right. And Newton defined that as a part of the Mind of God- one of the rules God used to create the universe as it is.
Belief in randomness isn't religion. It doesn't require anything approaching a god. I could write a mathematical function in a few lines that would give you something very like what we are seeing.
Which just proves that there's an intelligent mind behind it. Both concepts require *belief* and *faith*. You can no more prove that there is a pattern underneath the randomness than you can prove there is no God. The concepts are equal and based in faith and belief, not in reality.
Infallibility is never claimed.
You've claimed infalibility for science and Occam's razor several times in this discussion already.
Questions to the system are welcome.
Then why are you responding as if they're not? Why do you ban questions that can falsify the system from the classroom?
However, the peer review system is the best we have, and the accuracy of science is superior to virtually anything else.
And yet, the peer review system is all about censorship- it's
Too bad a higher power IS needed to explain this- the only question is whether that higher power is intelligent (God) or uninteligent (quantum random). Both are basically theological concepts that absolutely require faith to believe in.
You know he was pretty much wrong when he said that, right? Hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics have been pretty thoroughly disproven.
How do you prove a negative? Proving that there isn't an underlying pattern to the apparent pseudorandom behavior on a quantum level is like proving there is no God. And in fact, being a firm believer in the "God of the Gaps" theory- that's exactly what you're attempting when you claim there are no possible hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics. At best, you can only say there are no proven hidden variable theories- yet.
The difference between the macro and micro scales here is that when you measure one property of your particle, you actually cause some other property of both particles to become less certain.
Thus, if you could measure the probabililty of all properties at once, you can transmit information by measuring a single property.
If you make the supposition that the garden of Eden was really the ocean then it all makes sense!
Look at the description in Genesis sometime- you're not far off. It claims that out of the Garden of Eden flowed 4 rivers, and it names them (I forget their names mementarily, but they're all found in the Middle East). Reverse the direction of flow based on the idea that maybe it got lost in translation- and you have the four rivers flowing into the Garden of Eden- aka the Persian Gulf.
It's more fun macrameing your brain....after all, you don't know that what you've been told is real, is real. You just have faith that what you've been told is real, is real. Nice religion you've built up.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please, you can't do good science if you're constantly blathering about how you're imperfect and this is just an approximation.
On the contrary- you can't do good science without it. In fact, I'd say knowing one's own limitations is the very definition of the difference between GOOD SCIENCE and BAD SCIENCE. Almost every example of bad science I can name (Young Earth Creationism, Hollow Earth Theory, and Wandering Planet Extinction come to mind immediately, though there are MANY others) all suffer from a lack of ability to admit that one is wrong, or potentially wrong. In fact, if science has any philosophical validity at all, it's that the scientific method, when properly applied, insists upon labeling imperfections, assumptions, and approximations.
I find your marginalization of all that we've accomplished tiring.
Just as I find your marginalization of the greater amount of accomplishment to be rather absurd at best. The difference though, is if you'd open your mind, you'd find that what I'm talking about isn't marginalization- it's just not putting it up on a pedestal for people to throw rocks at it.
But you side-stepped his request: prove that you cannot prove a negative.
His request was invalid based on an incomplete understanding of a negative. A negative is an event with zero probabilility. You can prove that a negative has never happened so far, but you can never prove that probability is exactly zero.
And to an outside observer- both have an equal amount of proof- or lack thereof. Both are mere faith.
No, this is science.
Science IS a philosophy- a highly successful philosophy, but still a philosophy. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news- but you might want to take a look at how science started. It wasn't called "Natural Philosophy" in the days of DaVinci and Galileo for nothing.
Come back when you understand what that is.
Come back when you have an appreciation for the limits of humanity instead of an arrogant belief in a cult.
Say I have a black box with a screen on it. Every second it displays either a 1 or a 0. There is no way to ever predict which of a 1 or 0 it will be ahead of time, but it is 1 50% of the time and 0 50% of the time (in the same way a dice is 1 1/6th of the time). But there is no possibility of the box exploding, or anything other than a 1 or 0 appearing. Such a thing is random by any definition I've seen, but does not make physics stop working, and that's the level of randomness we need. Science doesn't rely on the existence of random in the way you're defining it.
Sorry- in my line of work that's considered pseudorandom. At best, it can only create a 1 or a 0 in accordance with the way the black box was designed; the very fact that it cannot explode or do anything unexpected makes it non-random. Did I mention I'm a software engineer by trade- working entirely in software, the realm of thought?
I insist that it exists in the same way I'd insist gravity exists. No, we don't know it's there for certain, but the evidence is overwhelming.
And yet gravity is entirely indescernable from a perpetually expanding universe.
Our scientific model of the universe appears to approach the fact. We don't know this for certain, but with enough confidence to base decisions on what to teach on it.
And that's the very arrogance that leads you into the semantic mistake of claiming infalibility- of pretending to be certain when you are NOT.
Laws of physics can still hold, provided they cannot precisely predict the outcome.
The whole idea of a LAW of physics instead of a THEORY is that it DOES precisely predict the outcome, in every case.
If you're not going to accept the conventional meanings of the words in the English language, it's going to make it very hard to have a discussion.
English is a highly imprecise language- and conventional meanings of words bring with them the bias of the speaker. Philosophicaly a religion has been any given system of belief for a very long time- it's the only definition that actually covers ALL religions as opposed to only organized monothesitic and polytheistic religions, which are subsets of the whole.
You can call it that if you will, but why must such a God be intelligent?
Because, as I have shown above, and you agreed to above, an unintelligent God yeilds Laws that aren't Laws and facts that aren't fact- an unpredictable, supernatural universe.
Are you seriously claiming the function I just wrote down has an intelligent mind?
No, I'm seriously claiming that for finite meanings of the word intelligent, YOU have an intelligent mind- and thus the pseudorandom function you just wrote down has an intelligent mind *behind* it. This is true for every pseudorandom software function or set of hardware we can think of- something has to limit the randomness for it to be pseudorandom.
A belief in the simplest explanation for an observed phenomenon is in a different category from a belief based solely on the teachings of authority.
The problem there is the observation itself is only as accurate as the instruments observing it; and just as finite, local, and non-universal as the teachings of an authority. In fact, most teachings of authorities of any type are based on observation; which is what makes them inaccurate and inadequate to begin with.
Perhaps so, in which case my apologies. They're not infallible, merely vastly superior to any alternative.
No, in fact, they are exactly the same as all of the alternatives- mere opinion that is sometimes true and sometimes false. Arrogance will get you nowhere with me.
Because I'm getting irritated. You seem to be wilfully misunderstanding the concept of randomness.
The reason you're getting irritated is because you don't actually understand the concept of randomness- only pseudorandomness.
If you consider a science journa
No no no, I congratulate *you*, noodly flipness, on the niche that you're building up, particularly in trying to get the last word in. *Your* post-modern religion is more than I can bear. Your dogma is a dogma all of it's speicial ownness. It seems to answer all the questions, except the one, where can I get funding or a decent paying job. I do believe there's a position for teaching philosophy 101 to grandmothers on the other side of Saturn, where the notions of reality, of time and being, of being and nothingness are discussed ad nauseaum.
Courts of law, user interface design, software engineering, art- there are plenty of places philosophy is useful. The scientific method itself was designed by philosophers. The idea that philosophy automatically leads to the poorhouse is based on an incomplete understanding of what philosophy is.
Dude: you want to find basic philosophical errors so badly it is somewhat funny.
Actually quite the reverse- I want people to tell the truth. If they KNOW something, I want that knowledge to be unchangeable, and if they're just telling me an opinion, I don't want them to use the word "KNOW".
I have no idea from where you conclude that there is an error: certainly nothing I said in that paragraph affords that conclusion.
The concept that something is irrelevant means that you are making a conscious decision to ignore evidence. Since you are not infalible and omniscient, you simply aren't qualified to make that decision, nobody is. Thus science is doomed to being forever wrong and incomplete.
I have no idea how you get from "science does not care who set up the constants" (because that is not its subject matter, but the subject matter of metaphisics or whatever) to "it is based on faith". Absolutely no idea.
If you don't care about a given set of data, you are taking it on faith that given set of data is truly irrelevant. How hard is this to understand?
You keep saying that, but it is 100% counterfactual.
If it was counterfactual, then there would be NOTHING, could be NOTHING irrelevant to science. All information, all evidence, true, false or otherwise, would need to be taken into account.
Science has most certainly and verifiably produced more that belief and tautologies. Look around you: the monitor, the plastic out of which your keyboard is made, the vaccines you've had as a child, the TV waves going through you, the fabric from which your cloths are made, your deodorant, the artifical flavour of the last piece of gum you had.
None of these are real outside of our belief that they are real. All you have stated here is that Science is the Religion that asserts that Reality is Real- which is a belief and a tautology. Just because something is based on faith does not automatically make it incorrect- but nor does it automatically make it correct, it's just another model of reality to consider.
Note that you are defining "structure" so as to exclude randomness... Of course you can do that, but then your statement becomes void.
Nice to know that you consider true statements to be void when they are inconvient to your beliefs- no different than any other fundamentalist.
I can only suggest that you study probability theory a bit: you'll immediately notice that randomness is in no way incompatible with the existence of "structure".
Only because probability theory is designed to say so. Proving a tautology with another tautology is not very useful.
Moreover, in most cases, randomness is just a convenient model devised to deal with "hidden variables", "macro-scale observations" &c. (There are interpretations of quantum mechanics in which randomness is a taken as intrinsic, but this is rather controversial) As such, its role is precisely to incorporate in our reasoning some kinds of lack of information.
And when you incoporate some kinds of lack of information into reasoning, that's called FAITH- that's exactly what faith is.
The precise meaning of "scientific fact" very crucially includes the fact that humans are finite. It is built in in the requirements of falsability, of reproducibility, and what not.
All of which, if you truly were including human finiteness into the equation, would merely be arbitrary rules for belief- dogma.
Of course! Anyone pretending that science is anything other that that is a liar.
And yet, we just had a judge claiming EXACTLY that- that disagreement with evolution is not allowed in classrooms in PA. The whole idea of allowing ID in the classroom is allowing disagreement.
Now, to be honest: I tend to be slightly demanding on the kind of disagreement I will pay attention to. In my experience, most disagreement arises from ignorance.
Even the ignorant may possess some data that the informed have overlooked- it's not safe to deny disagreement based only on ignorance.
But you can't.
Agreed, I can't. But just because I can't doesn't mean that nobody can, it just means that I can't.
A theorem isn't PROOF- it's based on unproven assumptions that haven't been shown not to be true yet.
PROOF would mean written in stone forever, infallible, something you can count on. I maintain you still can't have that- no human being can, we're simply incapable of it.
God IS in the gaps. He always has been. The gaps are just perpetually shrinking as science fills the gaps with explanations that prove things behave deterministically. :)
Exactly right. And as long as science limits itself to explainations that prove things behave deterministically, eventually God will no longer be the God of the gaps- but a very well defined something, defined by the very physical laws it/he/she/whatever created AND UNABLE OR UNWILLING TO DEFY THOSE LAWS. The great philosopher of our time, Kevin Smith, put it best in his screenplay Dogma- all of reality hinges on one important concept, that what God says is true. If it turns out that what God says, truly says not what other people say about him/her/it/whatever, is not true, then what we have is an indeterministic universe- at which point it all collapses, and NO physical laws exist.
Ah, my apologies for the semantical mis-step. I should not have implied that we had disproven every single possible 'hidden variable' theory, as it is possible that there is some underlying truth which gives the appearance of breaking all these rules while still, in fact, retaining them at some deeper level (much like how His Noodly Appendage is being obfuscated by this "evolution" business).
This is the exact real problem here- most scientific theories fall into the same semantical mis-step. This leads the religious bigots to accuse the scientific bigots of teaching atheism, and that's how we get into the whole mess. The obvious answer is to stop teaching science as fact- and start in middle school or earlier with the philosophical underpinnings of the scientific method and *why* they're assumed to be true, while NEVER actually claiming that they are true. Keep the magic in the system, there's no real need to expunge it.
Although I would note that, as far as I've seen, since the EPR 'paradox' was shown to in fact represent how the world works, hidden variable theories are not faring well - they involve giving up significant numbers of other aspects of our classical universe to retain the deterministic effects, and often introduce large amounts of additional cruft that doesn't lead to any useful predictions.
It is entirely possible we're too stupid to include enough variables- I remember when Star Trek tackled this in an episode, the holographic Einstein claimed it would require more than 21 dimensions to make sense of it. That's likely a low estimate. It's important to stay humble about all of this- arrogance is what leads us to the very semantic error you made above; and thus to the very argument we're discussing.
Actually, the other choice is not that it is quantum random, it is that _it doesn't matter_.
No, that's the cop-out that gets you out of caring. It's no more than an excuse for appealing to a higher athority.
Science is only concerned with things that are testable and observable.
Not always- just since people started giving the excuse "it doesn't matter" for not doing their jobs.
Science is agnostic (or even apatheist), but not inherently athiest. (though scientists themselves come in those and many othen varieties.)
Everybody brings their bias to the table; ignoring the bias doesn't help.
Also, there are many TOEs that don't involve randomness FYI. Randomness is an observed characteristic of quantum mechanics, the book is still out as to whether it is a defining one.
True enough- but all theories of evolution require variance within species and mutation to kick off the ability of a species to adapt. Species that don't have enough variance and mutation go extinct when their climate changes. This leads us to two untestible and unobservable conclusions: Something or someone set up the physical laws that lead to climate change, and something or someone is creating the pattern we view as random. Atheists say that something or someone is nothing- but that's just a belief as well, and thus religious. At this level of the explaination behind TOE, there's no escaping the religion, so might as well teach as many different religious theories as you can.
Don't go all philosophical on me: the point is, this is what we know now.
Philosophy is exactly the point. And knowledge indicates an accuracy and finalness wthat we can NEVER achieve. So it isn't what we "know" now, it's what we "think" now, a mere opinion that could change tomorrow given new evidence if we were open to new evidence. Which we're not, because we "know" instead of "think".
Yeah right. The fact is, when a molecule gets very cold, its location becomes fuzzy, hence the inherent property argument. Don't like it? Prove me wrong.
Just google Bose-Einstein condensation and look at the first link explaining the concept of absolute zero.
Okay then, go do your experiment and see if you can disprove Heisenberg. Also, make sure it can be repeated by somebody else.
You already suggested just such an experiment. However, repeatability is about as useful as the original observation- two fallible human beings seeing the same thing does not mean that they are seeing it accurately OR that their interpretation is the infallible truth.
Any statement of fact can be written in positive or negative form, so your statement simply says you can't prove anything at all. Positive: "I am going to the park today." Negative: "I am not going to remain outside the boundaries of the park today." Or more simply, "It is not true that it is not true that I am going to the park today."
Double negatives are not true negatives. So sorry, you lose on that one. Please try again.
You're seem to believe that the concept of randomness is anti-theistic, in which case your disagreement is with much, much, more than evolution. You couldn't possibly "lose" this argument, because you've already decided that observable evidence means nothing. In short, you're not talking about science.
Actually that's partially right. Actually, randomness is theistic- it presupposes an unintelligent god that we cannot predict. And the problem is far worse than "observable evidence means nothing" it's "the observer brings his bias to the observed".
The "who set up the universal constants" is a question which is completely irrelevant to science. It belongs to metaphysics, religion or---this is the candidate I'd favor---is essentially nonsensical.
And thus, science has a basic philosophical error in it- one which makes science into more faith than fact.
(Most of the proofs of existence of God and/or other similar stuff are based on arguments of infinite regression, like the one you are hinting at. I have failed, since I became aware of those arguments, that they prove not much more than the lack of imagination of the one using them. For example, in your case: why can it not be that universal constants are like they are just because they are? Or maybe because they cannot be otherwise?)
That too requires faith. You can't get away from it- science is a religion.
Science is merely interested in the fact that universal constants are as they are.
Yep, and as such, it will always remain based on belief and tautologies.
Introducing an agent assumed to have set the constants at the values they have, introduces in a big melodramatic move more problems than what it solves (it solves exactly zero problems...)
Actually, it solves quite a few problems- the problem of randomness for instance, as well as the problem of entropy.
I have no idea where you see this requirement come from.
Randomness requires a belief I do not share- the belief that there is no underlying structure to the universe.
The fact that something is complex by no means whatsoever requires that something else exist which can keep track of its complexity and/or control it.
And yet, we know of no other complexity, no other set of rules, that was not set up by an intelligent mind.
Well, there is no need in arguing that: that is essentially contained in the definitions of the words you are using. No one, absolutely no one, seriously pretends that humans are infinite, or that they can "get" anything 100% correctly, or anything remotely vaguely similar to that.
Actually, anybody who believes in scientific "fact" separate from God is seriously pretending that to a very large degree.
Indeed, it is not difficult to construe the scientific endeavor as precisely an attempt to do as much as is possible in the face of our finiteness.
Then we need to teach THAT- not facts written in stone that anybody who is brave enough to disagree with gets thrown out of the classroom for.
And so, out of your own mouth, you believe that all science is a waste of time, doomed to fail.
No- just the current incarnation of science is doomed to failure. The previous incarnation, the search for the mind of God, has made great progress. All the way to a theoretical limit beyond which we currently have no way to gain more information.
The problem is that you are trying to insert philosophy and metaphysics into science.
Science is not separate from philosophy, it's a form of philosophy.
So basically, you were wrong but couldn't admit it?
No, it's far worse than that- basically we're ALL wrong and are incapable of being right, no matter what we come up with, so we might as well teach the kids everything we can possibly think of in hopes that one of them will be more right than we have been, thus advancing science in a way we haven't thought of yet.
That the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is an inherent trait of fundamental particles and not a problem of observation.
Or at least if you're as arrogant as Heisenberg and think you are God and infallible, then it's an inherent trait of fundamental particles and not your own stupidity. See previous statement. The fact that particles stop moving at a given temperature means absolutely nothing to measuring their velocity, other than the fact that one potential method of measuring their position is to reduce their velocity to 0.
No.
And yet:
No, you have average velocity, not instantaneous.
Heisenberg didn't say anything about averages vs instantaneous.
As far as we can tell the decisions are completely random.
Yes, so? All that means is that the human race is a bunch of idiots. We already knew that. "As far as we can tell" just means that from our perspective the decisions appear to be random. That doesn't mean that from ALL perspecitves the decisions are random.
There's no rhyme or reason that we can make out.
Once again, so what? This just proves that human beings are incapable of reasoning on the level of an omniscient being, or even on the level of a being more scient than we are. Also something we already knew- no need to make up some idea of "randomness" to explain it, just admit that we're not the final product of the evolution of either our science, our culture, or our species.
Of course that could mean we're simply unable to comprehend it, but it would have to be a very complex pattern, and there doesn't seem to be any reason for a very complex pattern to exist.
Once again, that's only from our point of view, which is rather finite and limited.
Anyway, the numbers look random to us - so how would it ruin our theories if they truly were random?
True randomness would mean it's entirely outside of natural phenomena; beyond the ken of even an omniscient being. At which point, no possible laws could be discovered. No probability estimates would hold. Nothing could be predicted at all. Truly random means no rules.
Any scientific conclusion is only our current working model of the universe. You could have done thousands of careful experiments about how forces and acceleration work and then try and apply them to a speeding electron and get an answer that's entirely off-base. Science cannot and doesn't try to predict things with 100% accuracy.
And yet above, you arrogantly insist that randomness exists- not seeing the potential error in that.
However, I don't think you can deny that scientific predictions have been and are useful.
I agree they've been useful- but useful and accurate are two different things, as are fact and theory. No model actually approaches fact, so why claim to be teaching fact?
You appear to be using a different definition of "random" to everyone else.
Nope, same one. A random event is unpredictable in all frames of reference. That means that laws of physics do not hold for random events.
Not religion as it's conventionally defined.
I'm not, and have never been, conventional. A religion is just a system of belief, a model to explain the universe.
You can class me as believing in some mysterious generator that spits out numbers if you like, but that's in the same field as believing in some mysterious force that attracts massive objects towards each other.
Yep, exactly right. And Newton defined that as a part of the Mind of God- one of the rules God used to create the universe as it is.
Belief in randomness isn't religion. It doesn't require anything approaching a god. I could write a mathematical function in a few lines that would give you something very like what we are seeing.
Which just proves that there's an intelligent mind behind it. Both concepts require *belief* and *faith*. You can no more prove that there is a pattern underneath the randomness than you can prove there is no God. The concepts are equal and based in faith and belief, not in reality.
Infallibility is never claimed.
You've claimed infalibility for science and Occam's razor several times in this discussion already.
Questions to the system are welcome.
Then why are you responding as if they're not? Why do you ban questions that can falsify the system from the classroom?
However, the peer review system is the best we have, and the accuracy of science is superior to virtually anything else.
And yet, the peer review system is all about censorship- it's
Too bad a higher power IS needed to explain this- the only question is whether that higher power is intelligent (God) or uninteligent (quantum random). Both are basically theological concepts that absolutely require faith to believe in.
You know he was pretty much wrong when he said that, right? Hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics have been pretty thoroughly disproven.
How do you prove a negative? Proving that there isn't an underlying pattern to the apparent pseudorandom behavior on a quantum level is like proving there is no God. And in fact, being a firm believer in the "God of the Gaps" theory- that's exactly what you're attempting when you claim there are no possible hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics. At best, you can only say there are no proven hidden variable theories- yet.
The difference between the macro and micro scales here is that when you measure one property of your particle, you actually cause some other property of both particles to become less certain.
Thus, if you could measure the probabililty of all properties at once, you can transmit information by measuring a single property.
If you make the supposition that the garden of Eden was really the ocean then it all makes sense!
Look at the description in Genesis sometime- you're not far off. It claims that out of the Garden of Eden flowed 4 rivers, and it names them (I forget their names mementarily, but they're all found in the Middle East). Reverse the direction of flow based on the idea that maybe it got lost in translation- and you have the four rivers flowing into the Garden of Eden- aka the Persian Gulf.
It's more fun macrameing your brain....after all, you don't know that what you've been told is real, is real. You just have faith that what you've been told is real, is real. Nice religion you've built up.