Science is NOT faith-based!

[Skeptic Ginger]

It would seem that in a gnostic world, life itself is not a rational endeavour...

The whole solipsism/Matrix/my-senses-are-lying/last-Thursdayism issue can be simply resolved by saying that if reality is an illusion, science will describe that illusion as well as it can. Whether the illusion is "real" or not is irrelevant, as long as it doesn't affect the evidence. In which case, the difference itself becomes evidence.

Last Thursdayism? [chuckle chuckle]

 

[arthwollipot]

It would seem that in a gnostic world, life itself is not a rational endeavour...

The whole solipsism/Matrix/my-senses-are-lying/last-Thursdayism issue can be simply resolved by saying that if reality is an illusion, science will describe that illusion as well as it can. Whether the illusion is "real" or not is irrelevant, as long as it doesn't affect the evidence. In which case, the difference itself becomes evidence.

That's the kind of thing that I wanted to say earlier, but couldn't.

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

That's the exact same thing.

To me, "steering" implies a continuous process; that the process of guidance is inseparable from that of goal-achievement. But one may achieve a goal in many different ways. How can steering be fundamental when many paths lead to identical destinations?

And apperently you do use one of your own values: that the customer should get what he wants.

It is not so much a value as a practical consideration stemming from other values.

If they have an interest in the universe around them, then they share a value with humans who have an interest in the universe around them.

That is true. I'll only mention that those civilizations which are not interested in the universe are probably not interesting to us (also, I did say almost no values).

Whether they will largely make the same scientific discoveries as we have is interesting philosophical issue. It is not something we can be quite sure of.

Our observations of the most distant regions of the cosmos indicate that the fundamental laws of nature do not seem to vary across space or time. So their local universe should act in the same way as ours does.

A core principle of science is that of prediction. And our most powerful theories are those that make the most accurate predictions. The equations themselves are not so important--there are often many ways of formulating the same principle. So how could alien science be fundamentally different if their predictions match the universe?

The only answer I have is that they are made of different stuff--dark matter, say. Perhaps their knowledge of chemical processes is as limited as ours is of dark matter. But even then, you would merely have two sets of knowledge with little overlap, not outright contradiction.

On the one hand, the axioms they believe necessary for science may be so vastly different that their research deals mostly with things we never even imagined while they can't imagine the things we deal with. On the other hand, axioms do change sometimes and it may be that they once dabbled with ideas that we have considered as well.

What axioms are you talking about?

Another poster mentioned symmetry. Nowadays, this is treated very nearly as an axiom, and you would be hard-pressed to formulate a theory that doesn't utilize this. But it's not really an axiom at all. It's an observation about the universe; that the laws seem to be the same no matter what direction you're pointed in or where you are (among other things). Symmetry is certainly not all-encompassing, as is well known on Earth where "down" is a preferred direction.

Perhaps you're thinking of something like "velocity is additive". This was once thought to be true and now is not. But again this is not and never was an axiom; it was an observation that seemed valid for experiments at the time, but further experiments disproved. That's just how science progresses.

Only because people have chosen to draw sets in one way and not another. They do so quite subjectively, and doing it is a value judgement.

Yes; well, language is a funny thing. We all have our own internal definitions which may not match what others thing. And yet communication works.

It was your claim that "normal hearing" is "the state of hearing that gives the greatest survival advantage", so it is up to you to prove which level of hearing gives the greatest survival advantage. Otherwise your definition is useless.

Our hearing organs evolved to strike a balance between various tradeoffs, including both fidelity and energy cost. So I would simply assert that the current setup is close to optimal since that's the way it evolved. Not perfect, since our ears have not had time to adapt much to civilization, but still likely to be close.

So the question is then just "how to you define when the current apparatus is operating normally?". This is harder to answer, but is fairly easy in a negative sense: if it is impossible to distinguish between having a sense organ in a given state and not having the organ at all, then we can call it non-functional. Like the appendix, non-functional organs are at best neutral and at worst a problem waiting to happen.

Size is not much of a constraint to hearing. Plenty of animals have much smaller hearing organs than humans while still hearing much better (by some standards...)

Yes, and those standards tend to be set by survival advantage (well, the gene's advantage, but that's nitpicking).

Or even whether it even has a "purpose" because that sounds awfully teleological.

I sometimes have to force myself to say that organs aren't "designed" to do this or that . Yes, "purpose" is a slightly dubious term in biology, but organs do have functions.

I don't think a doctor discussing with his/her patient what treatment is necessary for a physical ailment can be called "counselling".

Remember the origin of this thread of discussion--that a great deal of this is only necessary because medicine is insufficiently advanced. Yes, I would definitely like to understand my treatment options if I had, say, terminal cancer. In a case like that, treatment and values are indeed inseparable.

But consider a "sufficiently advanced" medicine. My cancer can simply be removed (by nanobots or whatever) by a procedure no more involved than a haircut. Values don't need to enter into medicine of this kind.

Of course, there will still people that refuse treatments, the way that (some) Jehovah's Witnesses refuse (some) blood transfusions. But I think this is outside medicine. Dealing with the consequences of these values is within medicine but certainly not any kind of acceptance.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

It makes no difference at all, unless you are investigating a miracle which purports to break physical laws.

But how do you limit the scope of a supernatural entity? You can't know if physical laws are broken if you don't know what the true laws are.

ArmillarySphere does have a point, I'll grant. If you don't require that science describes "real" things, you don't really need any assumptions at all. That seems like a hard pill to swallow, though.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Dr T, we know what the true laws are because that's what the testable evidence shows. I'm really unclear what makes you think there is anything supernatural.

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

Just because you can't predict something specific, doesn't mean the rules of physics in this or that case don't exist.

Right. The original point wasn't that rules don't exist; it was that rules are not an assumption of science. Instead, they are a prediction of science. We know that some things have rules behind them and some things don't.

doesn't mean there is magic involved, gods involved, non-evidence things involved.

No one (here) ever suggested that. The universe has limits as to what we can know about it and what it can "know" about itself. That these limits exist is not an invitation to rely on faith; it's just a bound on our predictive capability. We probably should have expected this anyway given Gödel's work...

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

I'm really unclear what makes you think there is anything supernatural.

I'm really unclear why you think that I think there's anything supernatural. I thought I was very clear in my last post to you. I've only ever claimed that science assumes that there is no omnipotent supernatural being.

A big part of science is Popper's notion of falsifiability. Unfalsifiable things are outside science, but not because they're false--it's because they can't be shown to be true or false.

For most things, this simply doesn't matter. I neither know nor care if there are invisible fairies in my garden, because in any case they don't seem to do anything. They are irrelevant.

But an omnipotent god is quite another thing. It can change things on a whim, and there's absolutely nothing science can do to work around this.

So science simply has to assume the disexistence of such a being. This is a good thing, because it means we can still design cool airplanes and particle accelerators and stuff. Theists are left out in the cold, but that's fine by me. And theistic scientists? Well, I think we can all agree that the human mind has a tremendous capacity for believing contradictory things.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I'll revisit your post again tomorrow. But from glancing at it now, you just repeat the same thing as the rest, define a god which cannot be tested and declare it impossible to disprove god.

I have no issue with that except to add that a god which cannot be tested is an irrelevant god so who cares! I can't test for invisible pink unicorns in my back yard, no one seems to care too much about that either.

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

But from glancing at it now, you just repeat the same thing as the rest, define a god which cannot be tested and declare it impossible to disprove god.

There are theists who use part of the same argument. They then tend to make the logical error that because you cannot disprove god, then therefore god must exist (and their god to boot). But that was not the point of my argument; my point was that science is inconsistent with that notion of a god, and therefore for science to proceed we must discard the notion. But it's still true that you can't prove it, which makes it an assumption.

I have no issue with that except to add that a god which cannot be tested is an irrelevant god so who cares! I can't test for invisible pink unicorns in my back yard, no one seems to care too much about that either.

I agree that it's irrelevant in the sense that we can't do anything about it, which I think I mentioned before. But there's a slight difference here in that I don't need to change my behavior based on the existence of invisible pink unicorns. I can pretend they exist or not, and it doesn't change the rest of my beliefs or behavior one whit.

But if I seriously accepted the idea of an omnipotent god, I would have to question whether science was worth it or not. What is the use if the whole thing is a ruse?

So I don't accept the idea, because I like science and the benefits it brings.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[ArmillarySphere]

Last Thursdayism? [chuckle chuckle]

It's the idea that the world was really created last Thursday, with memories in your brain, photons in transit and all that. It just looks old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism

And really, the idea that the world really is the way it appears is more of a theory - granted, there are other ways to explain our perceptions, but then, there's this:

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

 

[ponderingturtle]

It would seem that in a gnostic world, life itself is not a rational endeavour...

The whole solipsism/Matrix/my-senses-are-lying/last-Thursdayism issue can be simply resolved by saying that if reality is an illusion, science will describe that illusion as well as it can. Whether the illusion is "real" or not is irrelevant, as long as it doesn't affect the evidence. In which case, the difference itself becomes evidence.

But if the illusion is the creation of a malign being, why is understanding it helpful? By its nature it would be corruptive and harmful as that is how it was designed.

Sure these are strange beliefs but not having them and believing that they are untrue would seem to be prerequisite belief for science.

 

[ponderingturtle]

I am saying that regardless of knowing something for example, when a single nucleus is going to decay, we can predict the half like for example, of a bunch of them.

That is not what you seemed to be saying earlier, but that there was some way to predict what would happen in an individual case.

And if we can either know location or speed of an electron (correct my physics ignorance if I have something wrong here) but not both at once, that's the 'rule'!

Not quite, we can know both of them to a certain combined precision. It seems that they do not have discrete locations and velocities

Just because you can't predict something specific, doesn't mean the rules of physics in this or that case don't exist.

Not exactly, but in the case of a decaying nucleus there is good evidence that a specific prediction is impossible. A statistical prediction is of course possible.

And just because we don't know for example if there is more we could know about something like when the nucleus would decay or whether there is no more we can know and the decay is truly random, doesn't mean there is magic involved, gods involved, non-evidence things involved. If random is the rule, then random is the rule and guess what? They all behave that way.

No one here was claiming that.

 

[ponderingturtle]

I'll revisit your post again tomorrow. But from glancing at it now, you just repeat the same thing as the rest, define a god which cannot be tested and declare it impossible to disprove god.

The reason people do that is that when ever testable claims about gods are made they are disproven.

 

[Beth]

So science simply has to assume the disexistence of such a being. This is a good thing, because it means we can still design cool airplanes and particle accelerators and stuff. Theists are left out in the cold, but that's fine by me. And theistic scientists? Well, I think we can all agree that the human mind has a tremendous capacity for believing contradictory things.

- Dr. Trintignant

Consider an example from mathematics: one need not "believe" both the axioms of euclidean geometry and non-euclidean geometry which are contradictory. A person only needs to decide which axioms to assume are true for the duration of their work.

Likewise, theistic scientists need not believe contradictory things. They can believe in god and assume, for the purposes of their work, that god will not act to change anything about what they are studying, or at least not in a way that contradicts the rules of nature already established.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Consider an example from mathematics: one need not "believe" both the axioms of euclidean geometry and non-euclidean geometry which are contradictory. A person only needs to decide which axioms to assume are true for the duration of their work.

Likewise, theistic scientists need not believe contradictory things. They can believe in god and assume, for the purposes of their work, that god will not act to change anything about what they are studying, or at least not in a way that contradicts the rules of nature already established.

How about scientists trying to determine how many people X loaves of bread and Y fish can feed?

 

[Beth]

How about scientists trying to determine how many people X loaves of bread and Y fish can feed?

Scientists always make things complicated. Caterers do this every day!

 

[Dr. Trintignant]

Consider an example from mathematics: one need not "believe" both the axioms of euclidean geometry and non-euclidean geometry which are contradictory. A person only needs to decide which axioms to assume are true for the duration of their work.

That's interesting that you bring that up, because I was considering bringing up something along the same lines; the "axiom of choice". It's absolutely true that you can treat the parallel postulate as either true or false and still come up with consistent results.

The axiom of choice is also interesting--again, you get consistent results whether you accept or reject it. But accepting it happens to be more practical--you can prove more things if you assume its truth. So that's what most mathematicians do nowadays.

Likewise, theistic scientists need not believe contradictory things. They can believe in god and assume, for the purposes of their work, that god will not act to change anything about what they are studying, or at least not in a way that contradicts the rules of nature already established.

Remember that my original assertion referred to a specific kind of god; one that was capable and willing to plant evidence. We can say for instance that the young-Earth creationist god is either of this kind of does not exist, because the evidence flatly contradicts it.

A theistic scientist could believe in a completely non-interventionist god, but in practice this is indistinguishable from atheism. A god that never bends the laws of nature is no different than the invisible pink unicorns.

So we're left with theistic scientists that believe in a god that sometimes does bend the laws. But not when science is practiced? Like the mathematician, we have a situation where you can believe something is either true or false, but not at the same time (at least not consistently). When doing science, our theistic scientist is indistinguishable from an atheist.

One more thing: I don't really know any mathematicians, but I doubt any would claim to "believe" in the axiom of choice (say). They might well do their work under the assumption that it's true, but that does not constitute "belief".

A scientist could do the same thing in principle, and say that they do not need to believe that supernatural events do not occur, and only that their work follows from the proposition that they don't. But I'll bet that most scientists don't do this--they actively believe the universe is entirely natural. So I think there is a difference here between mathematicians and scientists.

- Dr. Trintignant

 

[CapelDodger]

A theistic scientist could believe in a completely non-interventionist god, but in practice this is indistinguishable from atheism. A god that never bends the laws of nature is no different than the invisible pink unicorns.

No different in this life and universe. A theistic scientist could believe in a god who manifests in an after-life universe, which is far from atheistic.

(As to why they might, I see it as being a comfort-blanket. Scientists are people, after all, and some people need a comfort-blanket.)

I regard solipsism as utterly barren and worthy only of Philosophers and such-like self-regarding riff-raff. Just thought I'd mention that .

 

[CapelDodger]

In fact, I deal with this every day in my job as a computer programmer. My values are often not the same as our customers.

I hear that, but their money's as good as anybody else's, isn't it?

Sometimes, I am incapable of even understanding the motivation behind customer requests. But I am capable just the same of completing requests as long as they are articulated coherently.

Don't you mean once you've beaten a coherent request out of them?

 

[CapelDodger]

Perhaps there is an intelligent alien civilization out there. If so, it likely shares almost no values with humans--how could it, being so alien? And yet, if they have any interest in the universe around them, they will largely make the same scientific discoveries as we have. Perhaps their focus will be different, but the knowledge sets will overlap and certainly not contradict (to the extent that they are not simply mistaken).

We'll agree on hydrogen absorption lines, for instance. No value-judgements there. And we'll probably use very similar equipment to measure them with.

I regard science as humanity's greatest achievement because it transcends humanity. As it transcends any other industrialised species out there. If we ever do meet, that's what we'll know and judge each other by. And it's what we'll have in common, unlike gods and creation myths. We haven't even got those in common across our own species.