The Firesign Theater was way ahead of you on this.
The Firesign Theater was way ahead of you on this.
What about the rules that govern the mind when it is neither awake or in REM sleep? What are the laws that define the reality found in NREM sleep? Minds well trained in meditation can maintain conscious awareness in states nearly identical to NREM and I sure there is more truth to be found there. Are there limits for the possibilities of creation in the other realms of consciousness?
RE: What are the chances that EVERYTHING we currently know is WRONG?????
About the same as the chances that NOTHING we currently know is WRONG.
Runners_Dad wrote:
The Firesign Theater was way ahead of you on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAcHfymgh4Y
Can't believe it took 3 pages til this was posted.
Bad Wigins wrote:
...
That is not what I'm talking about. What I mean is that science doesn't come up with new ideas to explain anything unless it has to. It explains things with constructs of old ideas and calls it a theory whether it makes sense or not, as long as it makes successful predictions.
Geology is not in so bad a state as astrophysics, but is a good enough example because it uses chemistry, into which is woven quantum mechanics, whose general perspective is that of looking at "particles" or tiny little things. Though it's understood these things aren't like the big things, and can't be thought of the same way, that they are conceptualized as things at all shows a bias in how the science developed....
It doesn't sound like you have any understanding of quantum mechanics at all...
lrcosophy wrote:
Phil Officer wrote:
Define EVERYTHING and WRONG, then we can have a discussion.
Take for instance the observable world around us. In day to day life we observe the Earth as flat. Science has shown the Earth to be round, but perhaps this is incorrect. I have never done any kind of experiment to verify the earth is round. Ive just taken everybody's word for it.
With today's science we can't even prove the Earth is not stationary. We are moving towards a big reveal on this area. Magnetism and vibration have a larger role to plan than current accept science theories.
Bad Wigins wrote:[/b
With general relativity it's worse. The use of non-Euclidean geometries begs the question of what "space-time" is that it can be shaped thus, but no serious inquiry is made. It's enough to science that it works, not to bother about what the concepts actually mean.
The essence of science is empiricism. Empiricism entails a pragmatic outlook and privileges what is operative over what is speculative. However, there is no single thing invented by the human mind that better attests the power of abstract reasoning from first principles than general relativity. From a completely abstract principle, the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, one can deduce equations which on the one hand can be specialized to recover the classical Newtonian description of motion at slow speeds, and on the other hand can be used to correctly compute the perihelion of Mercury (and, later, to send artificial satellites to Jupiter). It's hard to imagine a fuller triumph of philosophy in the scientific setting, and with respect to astrophysics it's also the best we can hope for, it being impossible to conduct experiments at the physically relevant time, distance, and energy scales.
The collective knowledge of mankind is entirely environmental, or based on our exact location in time and space. Everything we understand, we understand within the context of our immediate surroundings (within reason, of course). The earth is a speck in the solar system, which is a speck in the galaxy, which is a speck in the universe, which may not be the top level of classification, or even singular. Then go the opposite way, we have a trillion cells within our own bodies, and who knows if we're even at the most elementary units. When you take it in that consideration, its almost certain that our collective knowledge is completely wrong.
lrcosophy wrote:
What are the chances our collective knowledge is incorrect? Some advanced race or totally sentient intelligence contacts us and shows us our knowledge is still basically in the dark ages. Would you be surprised we are wrong?
Like 1+1=2
What if we are wrong?
oke wrote:
Bad Wigins wrote:
Science has a bad habit of progressing by making new theories with old concepts to the bitter end, before discarding old concepts for better ones. It resists revolutionary ideas and treats them as a last resort. There is no reason for that kind of bias other than economics and training.
Do you work in science? I'm curious, not being snarky. I do and have had conversations with my peers about what I think is a misunderstanding of the general public.
First, you're talking about paradigm shifts -- moments of upheaval in a discipline that sort of turn everything on its head and change the way we train the next generation of scientists. We look back on those shifts fondly, if that word applies, because they are the moments of reckoning when we feel like we came into a new and better theory of whatever-it-is-we're-working-on.
But, what you're characterizing as bitter reluctance to accept new concepts I would call useful inertia. We have to exhaust ideas to find out if they hold up, and this is a REALLY long and meandering process. We're not so much reluctant to accept new ideas as suspicious of anything that doesn't have a TON of supporting evidence. And I think the lay-public underestimates or misunderstands what a major deal it would be to actually change the thinking in a discipline -- this is what the best scientists are always striving for, and it would be a total life/career-making breakthrough, but very few people achieve this because we set the bar for evidence extremely high.
So for instance, when 99 out of 100 scientists say they're convinced by evidence of human-caused climate change, it took DECADES of work and internal argument to get to that point. The fact that 1 out of 100 thinks they have an alternative explanation is well and good, and if they believe that they should keep working on the chance that they're right. We're just not rushing to accept or give "equal time" to every alternative interpretation, because the bar for support is extremely high and has already been cleared by the prevailing theory.
Good post
Appeal to authority fallacy and disguised ad-hominem attacks may be "good" for this board but are utterly vacuous arguments. Ever notice how scientists responding to philosophers usually resort to arrogance right off the bat? Try again , you sophomoric geeks.
One more explanation and then I'll ignore every non-philosopher (after all this is a thread about epistemology, not science). By preferring to adapt itself over time to new evidence, rather than regularly and closely examining its fundamental concepts, science is uncreative and backward. A cosmology founded on space, time, matter and energy will one day seem as silly as one founded on earth, wind, water and fire seems now. Space and time are fundamentally abstract ideas formed from local observations and are not suited to describing the whole universe. To use them on the large scale, they were adapted, but in the process weakened - the "age" of a distant galaxy is a theoretical extrapolation, not a direct observation of a clock. The use of non-Euclidean concepts - an abstraction - to describe space - a real thing - raises the unanswered question of what space actually is and how it can have a shape. GR is riddled with idealistic flaws that are ignored because it is more successful so far than any competing theory. But how much time and effort is put into competing theories? Therein is the developmental bias of science. Somewhere out there, probably, lurk new fundamental concepts that will work much better, but no scientist is looking for them as long as they can patch the old ones up.
Any more physicists waxing arrogant should look up my non-calculus solution to the alligator problem.
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