But what about the assumptions, where are they coming from? By deriving them from other assumptions. Good, you see the problem. So, there is always a moment (or even several) in the day of the physicist, when all scientific methods are exhausted, where he scratches his head with a sigh... the most effective solution is to go to the office of his colleague and discuss.
And when the problem is serious, the discussion is of philosophical nature : he tries with his colleague to elaborate concepts with words. Who said that words were not accurate enough to do science? They are not as accurate as equations, but their fuzzy nature is of a lot of help when your mind is trapped by the rigidity of the equations. They give you the room to expand the mind and to discuss with your colleagues. How many scientists discuss only with equations? This is not for nothing that it is asked to reduce the number of equations in a presentation: they are a bad tool for discussion and presentations are an invitation to discussion. The philosophical discussion reduces the accuracy of the ideas but gives more flexibility and opens new areas.
https://thezproject.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/the-philosophical-physicist/
Andreas Geisler I'm probably not making myself clear.
ReplyDeleteI agree that we don't truly know what reality is (I assume that reality exists because questioning the existence of reality is not a sane thing to do, as opposed to questioning the nature of reality). I've (honestly tried) to say so many times, but it goes without saying that our perceptions are limited and subject to all kinds of interpretations by the brain. I completely agree that we cannot know anything with truly absolute 100% certainty. Our perception of a thing is certainly not the same as the thing itself. But we don't have to make this assumption that they are one and the same, because we still know well enough what we will experience if do certain actions : stabbing ourselves, jumping off a cliff, etc. It doesn't matter what's actually happening, we know the resulting perceptions and interpretations will be regardless of how we label them. No, we don't know anything with true certainty, but we know some things well enough to act as though they were certain.
What I don't understand is the difference (if there is one) between your idea about the nature of reality and "it's all an illusion". Is that what you're trying to say, or have I completely missed the point ? Because everything being illusory or subjective just opens the floodgates to every quack out there, and I don't think that's what you're getting at. Yet, if you're saying that everything is wholly dependent on perception, I don't see how you can avoid it. How can you even claim that there's good and bad evidence, or even more or less evidence, for anything if, as you appear to be saying, everything is entirely subjective ? By what measure do you assign something credibility if you believe absolutely nothing ?
Subjective != illusory.
ReplyDeleteI am saying that "subjective/objective" is a false dichotomy, not because there are more than two options, but because there are no options.
Hence, it's silly to even give the only available option a name.
Historically, though, that option has been called "subjective".
The logical conclusion is that all that matters is the amount of evidence. Specifically Bayes theorem adapted to something like Quines' web of ideas. The result is that a thermometer reading isn't better evidence because it's unthinking. It's better evidence because there is a body of experience of thermometers working well, and beyond that, a body of experience of the theories on which thermometers function.
The size of those bodies of experience is what counts.
Does that make sense?
As an example, if you had a body of experience that tells you that thermometers are wrong a lot, then you don't believe in thermometers, and shouldn't. I mean, there are plenty of machines that are downright untrustworthy, scientology e-meters for instance.
At no point does it turn into "objective knowledge" though, because that's simply not a relevant category.
Then we get to the point of accessibility, which is slightly different.Some states just aren't reliably predictable (yet) from outside of the mind they're immediately available to. Brain scans might change that, though, which might have hilarious results.
As for "very predictable actions", well, yeah - that's what happens when we have lots of experience of something.
ReplyDeleteAll magician acts revolve around creating experiences that are contrary to expectation, and expectation is based on inductive prediction.