Belz...
Fiend God
My pleasure, fossil.
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Does anything exist?
- Thread starter Scorpion
- Start date
My pleasure, fossil.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
I resent that as a proud pre-cambrian.
Oh dear. I'm sorry to say this but you seem to be going backwards
. You are not learning anything at all about where you have been wrong (very wrong), and instead you are just ignoring the explanations that you did not previously agree with (from many decades ago, apparantly), and ploughing on with all your same preconcieved mistaken beliefs ... Look - nobody can actually "prove" things (about black holes or about anything else) ... how long is it going to take for you to understand that (and to stop asking for "proofs") 
.Science does not have to mean even just some non-experimental mathematical modelling. You are using a scientific approach to things if you just try to examine and understand it (whatever it is) in an objective way (that really means a truthful unbiased way), where you take into account whatever evidence you have and where you have a decent understanding of how reliable that evidence is ...
... really science is just an approach where we try to examine things in a completely honest way.
The difference with philosophy and with religion, which were the two earlier ways in which mankind believed they were understanding and explaining the world around us, is that their methods were not actually completely honest. In the case of religion I probably don't need to explain why the beliefs and claims were not honest. In the case of philosophy, by the time of Galileo it was eventually becoming obvious that there were serious limitations to the belief that philosophers could understand and explain the world merely by pure thought of reason alone ...
... it became increasingly clear that we needed to design various experiments and to gather actual data, and then to make an honest attempt at finding an explanation that fitted the data. When people started to do that, they found that they got amazingly accurate answers that were often completely different from what any philosophers had ever thought.
However, that did not stop philosophers continuing to reject experimental investigation of the universe, and continuing to believe that they were obtaining the true answers merely by force of their self-declared superior intellect ... only problem was, and still is, that as the decades rolled on, and more-&-more science was being done, every single claim that the philosophers had ever made was found out to be seriously flawed at best, and completely wrong at it's worst.
And yet we still have all these endless arguments in favour of the power of philosophy. Even though it is now far, FAR, beyond any credible doubt that philosophy does not have, and actually never did have that power … but in vast contrast, science has shown that it most certainly does have that power (and great deal more to boot).
Statement No.1 is not an explanation of existence. Actually again, the statement contains a "weasel wording" that attempts to slip in a misconception. In this case it is the words "as it explains", that's the same as if you'd written "because it explains", but then what you have is "No.1 The Higgs Boson exists because it explains observations, IOW the existence of the particle is consistent with our model" ... but that's simply a mistaken use of language ... what that says is because we have a certain model or description of the Higgs Boson, that is actually the reason why it exists! ... and that is clearly WRONG!
What that is trying to claim is that things have no existence until we measure them, or even no existence until & unless we describe them ... as if for some completely unexplained reason that act of measurement or description would cause them to suddenly begin to exist ...
... that is, IIRC, an ancient idea actually proposed by certain philosophers (some from about 1700 to 1900 or thereabouts IIRC). It's trying to claim that human thought is the cause for anything existing, or IOW that things have no actual existence except as mere thoughts in some sort of human mind ... it's getting well down the road into Solipsism again.
What statement No.1 should say, if indeed we want to avoid that trap, is that we can only show that things do exist if and when we can reliably and consistently detect them. So ...
No.1 We say that a thing exists if we can reliably & consistently detect it in some tangible physical way (e.g. an instrumental measurement).
We can postulate that a thing should exist, and theoreticians do that all the time. That's what Peter Higgs did for the Higgs Field ... he calculated that if the maths of the so-called Standard Model of Particle Physics (i.e. all the known subatomic particles/fields) is correct, then you can show mathematically that there must be another as yet undiscovered particle/field which became called the Higgs Boson/Field ... but that's not a confirmation that it does actually exist until we can actually detect it consistently ... and that's what finally did happen with LHC.
As far as your statement No.2 is concerned, where it says "No.2 The Higgs Boson Exists" ... that's actually fine, but it does require a confirmation by physical type of detection (again either an instrumental method or our human senses).
What you always seem to be promoting in all of your numerous threads on this entire subject, is the idea that just because we can see or otherwise sense objects, or just because science can detect and measure those objects, that (according to you) is not enough to say they actually exist ... not merely that they might not exist with exactly the properties we can detect, but claiming a realistic probability that they have no existence at all and are just some sort of illusion ... but that again is why you are actually straight back to a claim of Solipsism.
Actually what any careful physicist, and especially most theoreticians, say (or should say) about such ideas is - "there is no need to get into any discussion about whether things are said to "exist" or whether they are said by anyone to be "real" or "unreal" ... all we need to do is to study whatever we detect, and to make calculations based upon the properties that we detect." Then if anyone, such as a philosopher, wants to claim that the detected things have no existence, it is their burden to "prove" their claim.
Claim one should be
1) The conclusion to the evidence from the LHC is that we have detected the Higgs Boson.
The distinction between "exists" and "appears to exist" is rather stupid if "appears to exists" is "literally everything about the universe operates as if this was true."
It's the goddamn stupid "Qualia" argument again, just from a different angle.
It's the goddamn stupid "Qualia" argument again, just from a different angle.
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Belz...
Fiend God
Guys, Larry's admitted that he has no clue what the word means. He just knows that it doesn't mean "has been objectively observed" because that sounds way too factual.
Thermal
August Member
Sorry, what? We need degree level at a bare minimum to discuss philosophy? That's gonna /thread right pronto. I assume you have said philosophy degree? Don't bother saying you have a different science degree; it wouldn't matter.
Yeah, that's not what we are talking about, although the converse would apply to you I you really believed that. What's your postgrad Philosophy work again?
No one here is arguing against science, or even suggesting it plays second fiddle. What is being argued is that Philosophy is fine for what it is, but we are hearing this strawman dismissal that sounds like it's from a 12 year old in the back row wearing a Spongebob t-shirt saying "philosophy is stoooooopid, maaaaan".
This sweeping dismissal seems based on the foolish idea that all philosophy is metaphysics. And it's not, full stop. The reason I asked that poster if he ever actually received formal instruction was because he keeps lobbying a strawman version. As I said earlier, the Mickey Mouse intro course I took in college was geared towards logic, critical thinking and evaluation. At the very end, metaphysics were dropped in as kind of a test, where we were expected to use our formally refined thinking to analyze the fringes.
The weirdest part is that in my course at least, the curriculum was straight out of a skeptics playbook, right down to dissecting woo.
Again, myself and the others you cite are in no way saying that Philosophy is the real answer, or even an alternative answer. We are saying that the Spongebob arguments are embarrassing on a skeptics forum, and the handwaving of repeated explanations (and strawman and goalposts moving and other fallacious tripe) is so much worse.
Belz...
Fiend God
I can hear "Boo! I wanted to be able to discuss stuff without any knowledge! That's why I avoid science!" already.
"Listen I totally agree that we need science to answer questions."
(Wait for it.)
"Nobody here is saying we can answer questions without applying logic, reason, falsifiability, and other concepts."
(Wait for it.)
"Nobody is saying that."
(Wait for it.)
"Nobody."
(Wait for it.)
(Wait for it.)
(Wait for it.)
"But..."
(There it is.)
(Wait for it.)
"Nobody here is saying we can answer questions without applying logic, reason, falsifiability, and other concepts."
(Wait for it.)
"Nobody is saying that."
(Wait for it.)
"Nobody."
(Wait for it.)
(Wait for it.)
(Wait for it.)
"But..."
(There it is.)
Thermal
August Member
No more discussion in SI&CE without a sociology degree, I suppose? Any political postings must therefore include at least a bachelors in Pol Sci, correct?
It's an informal freaking discussion. Claiming you must have postgraduate degrees to discuss it with presumed post grad students with *checks notes* Spongebob level arguments is where we're at now? Got it.
Da hell?
You're the one who wanted to know if someone had taken a philosophy course. When exactly did the winds shift and you became the victim here?
I forget how often the stupid hills you find to defend have a cross for you to nail yourself to on them.
You're the one who wanted to know if someone had taken a philosophy course. When exactly did the winds shift and you became the victim here?
I forget how often the stupid hills you find to defend have a cross for you to nail yourself to on them.
Thermal
August Member
Ok I give up. What the hell are you talking about now? The current gist is that you need postgrad degrees to discuss here. That is ridiculous, on several levels. Agree or nah?
Eta: and shove the ad hom. You're ripping through all the fallacies, anyway. That's instructive.
Eta the second: you might notice that in fact you are the one dying on the hill. You are the top poster in fact, with over three times my posts, most of which are handwaving and repeating the handwaving to reassert the strawman.
Eta: and shove the ad hom. You're ripping through all the fallacies, anyway. That's instructive.
Eta the second: you might notice that in fact you are the one dying on the hill. You are the top poster in fact, with over three times my posts, most of which are handwaving and repeating the handwaving to reassert the strawman.
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In earlier posts as #205 you said "Observation is all we have when talking about reality." and #356 you said ""real" means "observable"."
How would you define observation, or observable?
*Confused* Do you actually have with conversations with people or do people just talk around you and voices in your head say things only vaguely related to what they are saying and you respond to that?
I never said anything about anyone's qualifications to be in this discussion. Not one goddamn thing.
YOU DID. You are aware of that right? That you, not anyone else, introduced the concept of gatekeeping this discussion. The level of gall to then get mad at us is rather striking.
And frankly I'd love to know what exactly the qualifications are for philosophy. How do you something "wrong" that has no standards or structure?
Scorpion and Jabba and the Time Cube guy are all world class, just grade A philosophers as far as I am concerned.
Now let's see if your response is anything beyond "getting huffy."
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Ah yes "How do you define 'is?'" part of the philosophy nonsense handbook.
Belz...
Fiend God
You might have "gotten it" if you had read the post you responded to.
Belz...
Fiend God
Open a ******* dictionary, Larry. Children as young as 4 understand that word.