/sci/ - Science & Math

We'll just build machines that can observe what we cannot.

Microscopes and shit.

>>4291434

Good luck building machines which are capable of existing outside of the universe we live in.

Haha you don't even deny that it's a god of the gaps argument.

>>4291441

Good luck making shit up because you know whatever you're saying doesn't exist in this universe.

I might be a little close-minded but everything that isn't inside this universe isn't reality for me.
Assuming there are other universes of course.

>>4291444

It's not a God of the gaps argument. I don't assert God exists anywhere in there.

There does not need to be a God/Empiricism dichotomy. I have seen no proof that one of these things must exist and that both of these are mutually exclusive.

What's the point you are trying to make?
You smell like a religious troll.

not even a religious troll, just some godfag -> much worse

"spiritualism, idealism and theology on the other."- srsly?

As I progressed through my education and entered the post-graduate school phase I came more and more around to this fear, I really do think that there may well be a point we reach where physical constraints prevent us from empirically confirming our physics, though I'm not sure if it would be possible to tell when one reached that stage.

We will just keep on building bigger accelerators and microscopes.... the data will keep on flowing.
Nothing wrong with that.

>>4291449

If there is a single reality, part of which is observable and part of which is not, is it difficult to deduce that empiricism has an upper bound?

What then of regions beyond that bound? Ah... the realm of metaphysics!

And you needn't imagine pluralistic worlds and spatial separation. Empiricism can't even apply itself between your ears.

This argument assumes no paradigm shifts, and that the universe is ultimately not understandable.

You are making a metaphysical argument to prove that metaphysics will again replace empiricism. Which, I suppose, you'd have to. You certainly can't show it empirically.

Suffice to say that the answer has never been "Magic" so far, and it's unlikely to be "Magic" for the foreseeable future, so in the ultimate sense we'll have to see how it goes.

Whatever the result, I think history has shown us that you have more positives to gain from testing and checking then from sitting around and thinking.

>>4291459

Would you believe me if I told you I was neither religious nor an atheist nor agnostic?

>>4291489

Mathematics is metaphysically derived, hence the quote from Bertrand Russell, who, despite devoting the majority of his life to defining a self-consistent axiom schema for logical reductions of mathematics, came to believe such a task was impossible.

Hay, OP.
You're an idiot.
lrn2 stop shitting out contextless quotes from that people nobody cares about and actually develop an argument yourself.
kthnx bye.

>>4291492
No.

>>4291465

Kurt Godel said those words, not me. There is not a person who has ever visited this board that could even come close to touching that man's intellect.

We're talking about a guy who found an incredibly imaginative, non-trivial solution to the EFE after a casual conversation with Einstein. It took Schrodinger a year.

i support you op

empiricists need to know their place

>>4291497

Of course it was, but the reason it has remained so is for purely practical reasons. You need to have an axiom, because otherwise you go into an infinite recursion of "why" instead of getting anything practical done.

The simple truth is that empiricism has practical results, and metaphysics cannot agree on basic definitions, let alone show proofs that are universally understandably or applicable.

>>4291504
Damn right.
We will soon experience a rise of the soft sciences, where things are not measured, they are approximated.

>>4291487
If it's not observable then it can't affect us or any models we come up with in any way.

Everything that exists is observable, if it wasn't observable, it wouldn't exist to us.

ANYTHING that interacts with us in ANY way is observable, directly or indirectly. This is basic logic.

>>4291511
practicality is a human construct

why does that matter ?

>>4291517
It matters because fuck off you circlejerking cunt.

>>4291517

Because those who believe it does will outlive and outproduce those who believe it doesn't.

>>4291511

Sorry, but doesn't physics utilize mathematics all the time?

And if mathematics cannot be reduced to a self-consistent axiom schema, doesn't that mean the same thing for physics?

Does that not mean that physics can, at best, offer a statistical approximation of certain aspects of our universe, while feigning no hypothesis as to why these approximations are so?

>>4291508
haha your argument is invalid.
btt physics on a high level nowaday melts into what was considered metaphysics a couple of hundred years ago. why treat them as opposits or contradictory anyway, theyre just two different areas in ontology. talking of the serious metaphysics here, not theology and spiritualism

>>4291513

The Enlightenment and Empiricism were born out of philosophy. We will return to that most basic arena of human thought with the seriousness and earnest consideration it has been robbed of since the divergence of physics and metaphysics.

What we will conclude, I can't imagine. But, in the same sense that one can anticipate a unified theory, I think one can anticipate this shift in thinking.

>>4291508

If Kurt Gödel was so smart, then why did he starve himself to death?

Checkmate, metaphysicists, I'll have that food if not obscure and underground "out of this universe" enough for you.

>>4291535

I agree with this. I may be misunderstanding you, however (this is a persistent problem in philosophy and verbal expression in general).

>>4291539

lol'd

>>4291511

>>You need to have an axiom, because otherwise you go into an infinite recursion of "why" instead of getting anything practical done.

What if you do get practical things done, and just forever withhold judgement? That's what I do.

>>4291426

>wither away and die

Stopped reading. Kill yourself.

>>4291526

It's entirely self-consistent. Just because it doesn't allow an eternal recursive loop of "why" statements doesn't mean it isn't consistent. If it wasn't, we certainly wouldn't be conversing at the speed of light through an international network.

And nothing we will ever do will be anything more than a statistical approximation of reality. When you see things, you are not directly interacting with them, your brain is modelling an image captured by your retina and processing it in a way your concious mind can comprehend. Everything you perceive exists only within your skull. You can never actually 'touch' anything, you simply get so close that the atoms in your fingers repel and are repelled by the atoms in the thing you touch, and your nerve endings relay that signal back to your ever-modelling brain.

That's just the way reality works.

>>4291562

That's fine, but by doing that you are accepting that the system works from a practical standpoint.

Unless and Until it fails, at which point you can rightfully step in and start trying to figure out what's happening. That is entirely the right attitude to have.

>>4291539
If he didn't starve himself to death, he probably would've been poisoned by an entity whose name was not recorded by the history books.

He was so smart that he saw the poison coming. In our time period, looking back at his biography, we would not have known the ones who tried to kill him, for they know how to hide themselves well. Godel realized he could either die as a fool who got tricked by his food, or as an independent man.

the observations we make may sometimes seem contradictory, but the important thing is the coherency of the axioms.

>>4291571

>2012
>not knowing about Incompleteness
>not knowing what consistent means
>espousing solipsism, electromagnetic theory of consciousness

>>4291595

Solipsism says that other minds and things may not exist, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that you understand things by making a mental model of them, not by directly interacting with them. They exist, but you cannot touch them.

Hell, you cannot "directly" interact with anything, everything at the lowest level is simply probability space.

@ TO
so you propose there exists an objective reality that cannot be known by empirical observation?
judging your system by the number of premises it is a better theory than empiricism, your problem is it doesnt explain shit. nothing at all.

H+
how did you come to the conclusion anything exists at all?

>>4291515


>>4291468 was me, nothing else was. Now tripfagging.

We've passed the age where we could really hold on to the idea that anything that interacts with us is non-trivially understandable. There seem to be very real constraints on the depths at which we probe- the obvious one is analysis of anything near or below the planck scale, where the energies needed for observation rapidly approach levels that lead to black holes. Humans are only going to exist in this universe for a finite time, and we can only use the tools and techniques available to us, including technological augmentation.

Atheism doesn't suggest that the universe is inherently emprically understandable, in fact the realization that there probably isn't a "purpose" to the universe robs us of our ability to dogmatically ohld that full knowledge is possible. There almost definitely is a set of real, empirical answers to explain why reality is the way it is- I'm just not at all confident that humans will ever find those answers, or that they're even capable of being found.

>>4291614

I'm not a ruthlessly intelligent scientist/mathematician/philosopher. That's well beyond my capability to actually offer a wholesome new philosophy that is simultaneously metaphysical and empirical. I'm only anticipating that sort of thing.

My anticipation is not the result of some unique insights on my part. I read it as advanced by Godel. It does seem like the right direction to take after the incompleteness theorems, which, historically, will probably be seen as the the nail in the coffin for unrestricted empiricism or "Theory of Everything."

It takes a long time for the consequences of monumental and direction-altering achievements to take full effect.

>>4291632
lets clarify this a little....
i believe what your talking about is not really a conflict between physics and metaphysics as there exists no such conflict in a coherent theory of ontology. your objection isnt about ontology, its about epistemology. what youre critizising is empiricism, you are instead proposing a combination of empiricism and rationalism. is this about what you wanted to say or if not where did i go wrong?

>>4291620

I accept it as a basic axiom in the same way we accept that numbers or concepts can be related to others and that mathematical operators have meaning.

Also, it is a much simpler explanation than my mind being so immense that it can simulate an entire universe or at least the outputs which I would recognize, yet simultaneously so limited that I cannot fully model anything outside of myself to a perfect degree. That explanation fails the Steelyard.

>>4291678
that would have been my answer aswell. i dont quite understand why so many people have problems acknowledging there is no absolute truth.

>>4291702

You can have things that are basically "as true as you can get" which is what I would define as truth, but a "true absolute" doesn't exist because eventually you back up to the point where somebody asks you why you are assuming words have meaning and you have to respond with an axiom.

Most people don't perceive of reality as a probability function that happens to factor though, so I may be a bit weird in that regard.

>>4291675

There are different levels of Empiricism, some of which are open to metaphysical union, others which reject it entirely.

I am rejecting the schools of empiricism which assert that nothing should be believed without pragmatism, and which assert axiomatically that our reason stems solely from empirical refinement.

I do not suggest we simply pick an explanation ad hoc to satisfy our desire to know. I do think we can arrive at certain truths by relying only on our intuition, and that these truths are often far more powerful and meaningful than those which are gathered empirically.

I'd like to see physics refined to be consciously aware that is describing a specifically human relationship with reality. I would like to see the language of set theory applied to 'real' objects, perhaps a synthesis of information theory and set theory.

I would like to see an explicit, metaphysically based, model of models. I want to know what we can deduce from a model of models.

the most basic stuff i can think of right now: law of identity, law of contradiction, modus ponens style causality, the existence of something.

>>4291743

There is nothing basic about these things. Just consider for a moment the difference between the physics definition of existence and the mathematical definition.

We assert something exists in a physical sense when we can gather information about it or infer its presence from other information. In math, we say something exists when an abstract concept meets our abstract definition.

intuition, as in excluding reason and relying on some primate instincs or stuff you got from socialization?

>>4291758

I believe reason is intuitive. I don't think, for example, that a conscious observer with rules inconsistent with the rules of his reality can exist.

This does beg the question of why human beings are so often wrong, however.

Anyway, pleasure picking everyone's brains. I'm off to class. If the thread's still up I'll chime back in in a few hours.

there is no truth, there is only falsification. truth can only exist in a system of predetermined axiomas (as for instance in mathematics: "if these axiomas are accepted, then x is true", but only if certain axiomas are assumed as Godel has established. the sooner we get over this the better. (this is not my work, and it builds on even other work by N.N. Taleb, but is related)
http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2011/05/black-swan-technology.html

so the rules we have formed cannot stand in conflict with the rules of our reality? how did you get to this view?

We are gonna need a way to measure God then. Anybody got a ruler?

>>4291815

Alright, we'll call this "one"...

>>4291742
>I do think we can arrive at certain truths by relying only on our intuition, and that these truths are often far more powerful and meaningful than those which are gathered empirically.

Truths aren't "gathered empirically" anyway, empirical data has to be interpreted. Interpreted by, as you say, intuition. "There are no facts, only interpretations" -Nietzsche

"The truth is that science is organized, like any other discourse, on the basis of a conventional logic, but it demands for its justification, like any other ideological discourse, a real "objective" reference, in a process of substance. If the principle of identity is somehow "true," even at the infinitesimal level of two atoms, then the entire conventional edifice of science that derives its inspiration from that level is also "true." The hypothesis of the genetic code, DNA, is also true and unsurpassable. So it goes with metaphysics. Science accounts for things previously encircled and formalized so as to be sure to obey it. "Objectivity" is nothing else than that, and the ethic which comes to sanction this objective knowledge is nothing less than a system of defense and imposed ignorance, whose goal is to preserve this vicious circle intact." -Jean Baudrillard

Scientists often forget their purpose: to create models which can be used to bend the universe to our will. It's something they're very good at. When they start to think they are "unraveling reality", "finding truth", or working towards a "perfect universal model", they've become deluded. Empiricism won't die until it can no longer help us master our universe, which won't be happening any time soon. We have limits of "observational and computational capacities", like all lifeforms, but future humans will be more intelligent than us. They will be better than human. The "humans" after them will be even smarter and more powerful, etc.

>>4291823

I don't like his nose (Or lack thereof).

Do you ever post outside atheism vs. religion threads?

>>4292112

Technically this is an empiricism vs metaethics thread.

And I'm only on periodically, so I post in whatever is on the front page.

Which, being /sci/, tends to be atheism vs religion threads.

Hell, I haven't even seen you or Inurdaes or Mad Scientist in a thread for a month or more.

>>4291702
>i dont quite understand why so many people have problems acknowledging there is no absolute truth.
What do you mean by this? That we can't reach that absolute truth, or that there is literally no one such truth? If so, why do you think that?