The Limits of Science

[DrEvil]

Science is limited to what can be observed. So anything that doesn't produce sensory data for the observer to process can't be studied scientifically. Also systems that change under observation. The unobserved system can't be studied scientifically. And then there's the unobservable states of a system. To know exactly what it is doing, where it is going becomes unknowable. Know the location and velocity, what it is doing exactly becomes unknowable.

I'd leave god out of it, though. Everyone has different ideas of what the one true god is. My god is good, and didn't create evil. Lord of wisdom's light. Not omnipotent, but omniscient. I don't presume to speak directly to him, I talk with his angels instead. So I guess they represent the master whatevers for me. The goddess, though, I speak to directly.

Yes, when science is knowledge, it is limitless. Metaphysics looks very different than physics, though. Applied scientific methods are not all compatible. Pataphysics is the only method that is. It is universally compatable.

Disagree with the bolded part. We can observe how an unobserved system influences the observed system, like dark matter. We can't see it, but we can see the effects it has on normal matter.

[DrEvil]

.

I guess this reveals a bit about conniption. I'm sort of glad to get this Your Lord God stuff, it's very reassuring. I hadn't even thought it, but now it's got all the pleasure of confirmation bias.

Heh. I agree with parts of the article, it just bugs me that it feels like a sneaky attempt at preaching. Lure people in with more or less valid criticisms of science, then WHAM!, play the God card.

If by sneaky you mean obnoxiously loud holier-than-thou monotheist proselytizing to the sinners from on high, then yeh, sneaky.

His starting point is that God exists, so even before he starts he's got a fundamental view that puts some things out of reach of science. It's an arbitrary line that says "this you can study, this you can't", and it makes no sense.

Nah, the idea that "God exists" is already what most people think, often with little definition beyond that and with little obvious consequence in their view of the world otherwise or even their potential to do science.

This guy's starting point is that he's got a personal line to this One-True-All-Seeing-All-Powerful-Creator-of-Everything-Sentient-Godbeing who has a very special interest in you and your soul and has been telling you the right way to exist and you haven't been listening. Or, at least, his starting point is that he sees it, and you don't, probably because you're wrong, and that this makes him really fucking knowledgeable compared to you, and that you had better pray to it and listen to him, or else.

I also don't buy his assertion that some things are beyond science. Beyond current science and methods of inquiry, sure, but not beyond by default.

Most of what there is to be potentially known as well as the possibly larger universe of the forever-unknown-unknowable will always be beyond the strict scientific-experimental method as currently constituted or as it is likely to ever be constituted by human beings and their creations. I mean, unless you can find a time rewind function and have a few hundred billion years and a few trillion eyes to spare watching everything unfold repeatedly each time with given variables isolated... so I guess that makes this kind of Ultra-God a necessity!

.

In practice, yes, but in theory, no. Our circumstances prevent us from studying many things, but I don't think there is some fundamental law of nature saying "this is beyond human inquiry". I can't study something on the other side of the planet, but I can in theory go there and do so, and I can't directly observe something that happened ten years ago (actually I can, but only through electromagnetic radiation. If you look at the sun you're looking at the past), but I could have had I been there. The limitations are our own, not hardwired into the universe.

[JackRiddler]

Ok, Dr. oh-so Evil -- dontcha wish? -- you know I know all that. And it's all describing observation and empirical systematization, not the gold standard of repeatable experimental confirmation under controlled conditions of an elegantly defined falsifiable hypothesis that concords with a larger model whose parts are similarly confirmable within a theoretical framework that makes sense and consistently allows confirmable predictions. That is constantly dangled as though this or that haphazard methodology produced by necessity and funding may as well be it, when it isn't, and as if this or that is therefore "scientifically known and proven," forevermore, when it isn't. Fuck, the only place where it's definitively there is human-level earth chemistry and mechanics, which is why everyone hates the chemists. All of which we both know. So the scientific method has some hard limits for demonstrating truths (for lack of a better word), unless... (go back to this point in my last post if you don't know what I'm about to say here...)

.

[dada]

"Disagree with the bolded part. We can observe how an unobserved system influences the observed system, like dark matter. We can't see it, but we can see the effects it has on normal matter."

I phrased that badly. I meant that as a matter of scientific integrity, science must restrict itself to observable data. The limits of science wouldn't be bad in my universe, they'd be what makes science so good at what it does.

Also, just want to be clear, here. When you say 'The limitations are our own, not hardwired into the universe," this is still in theory, yes?

[Iamwhomiam]

Matter doesn't exist, it only appears to exist. All is pure, pulsating energy. Our senses confuse us into believing matter exists and is a solid state of energy we interact with.

When all that is to be known is known, they all smile at dada.

Until then, snitches will still get stitches.

dada wrote: "You want to get special dispensation, otherwise speak at your own peril."

Hell, who doesn't want special dispensation! Since the cusp of the bronze age to iron age we've been conditioned to believe we're born sinners, condemned before birth. For dispensation, along with your weekly tithe, you must also partake weekly in lifelong arcane rituals you little understand, and even then your chances for entry into and living eternally ever after in God's peaceful paradise remains iffy. I imagine god only makes war when St. Peter accepts to many of the jerks he created.


I pretty much know my destiny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrwaVpWUOgg

Some may be surprised by their just reward:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYq_35xJtFY

While some will surely die without believing in an afterlife. Flat Earthers beware! You're in for the ride of a lifetime!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToTgcBRC4FE

Edited to complete incomplete sentence and to replace 'he' with 'god'.

[DrEvil]

"Disagree with the bolded part. We can observe how an unobserved system influences the observed system, like dark matter. We can't see it, but we can see the effects it has on normal matter."

I phrased that badly. I meant that as a matter of scientific integrity, science must restrict itself to observable data. The limits of science wouldn't be bad in my universe, they'd be what makes science so good at what it does.

Also, just want to be clear, here. When you say 'The limitations are our own, not hardwired into the universe," this is still in theory, yes?

Of course. It's based off my personal beliefs on our place in the universe. That is: we're a random fluke and the universe doesn't give a flying fuck about us, but there is no way to prove that, so theory/belief, not fact.

I doubt we will ever know everything, so there will probably always be things that we have to chose to believe or not without being able to prove it one way or the other.

[DrEvil]

Ok, Dr. oh-so Evil -- dontcha wish? -- you know I know all that. And it's all describing observation and empirical systematization, not the gold standard of repeatable experimental confirmation under controlled conditions of an elegantly defined falsifiable hypothesis that concords with a larger model whose parts are similarly confirmable within a theoretical framework that makes sense and consistently allows confirmable predictions. That is constantly dangled as though this or that haphazard methodology produced by necessity and funding may as well be it, when it isn't, and as if this or that is therefore "scientifically known and proven," forevermore, when it isn't. Fuck, the only place where it's definitively there is human-level earth chemistry and mechanics, which is why everyone hates the chemists. All of which we both know. So the scientific method has some hard limits for demonstrating truths (for lack of a better word), unless... (go back to this point in my last post if you don't know what I'm about to say here...)

.

Okay, now I'm not entirely sure what you mean... but yes, obviously our scientific method has limitations, but they're not limitations imposed by the universe, they're imposed by our circumstances. There's tons of things we can never observe or know, but not because the universe has a hard law that says we can't, but because we weren't there to observe them at the time or place it happened. Plenty of things are off limits in practice, but not in theory.

There's no special category of stuff that we can never know, no matter what, just because. There's always a practical reason for why we can't know something (we weren't there, our brains are too primitive, we perceive time linearly), not a commandment from God saying "not for you, period."

[JackRiddler]

There's tons of things we can never observe or know

and even fewer tons of things we can come to know through strict scientific method, which is to say, a method based on observation (including indirect), hypothesis, prediction, and controlled experimentation. And that's going to remain so, regardless of laws.

[JackRiddler]

.

Perhaps BS meant to post this here, here's the cross-post.

.

This take gets more prescient with each passing year:

3:AM: You’re a Wittgensteinian expert. So let’s start with Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism. You argue that there were three levels of hostility towards science from Wittgenstein. So what was wrong with scientism according to Wittgenstein, and did this bleed into his attitude to science itself?

BC: As you say, I think we can distinguish three levels of hostility in Wittgenstein’s remarks about science and scientism. There is hostility to the scientism that treats science as the only respectable form of enquiry and ignores the value of other kinds of investigation. There is hostility to the spirit in which contemporary science is conducted, which Wittgenstein thinks is the spirit that informs western civilization as a whole. And, occasionally, there are signs of an attitude that goes further than the anti-scientism expressed in these first two forms of hostility: hostility to science itself. I will say a bit about each of those.

First of all, Wittgenstein’s hostility to the scientistic tendency to take science as the model for all enquiry. His objection here is not to the institution or methodology of science as such; it is to the overgeneralization of scientific thinking to forms of enquiry where it is not appropriate. He is thinking of two features of scientific thinking in particular: its focus on causal explanation and its aspiration to achieve generality in its explanations. There are many areas of human enquiry, Wittgenstein insists, where neither causal explanation nor the search for general laws are appropriate.

...

Now for the second level of Wittgenstein’s hostility: his objection to the spirit of ‘the typical western scientist’ (Culture and Value, p, 7). Science, he writes, is driven by a commitment to making progress, to ‘onwards movement [and to] building ever larger and more complicated structures’; it involves an endless quest for novelty, ‘add[ing] one construction after another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next’ (Philosophical Remarks p. 7). Science values knowledge only as a means to an end. And ‘the spirit in which science is carried on nowadays’, he complains, is incompatible with a sense of wonder at nature: ‘Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again’ (Culture and Value, p. 5).
...Wittgenstein is not objecting to scientific method or scientific understanding itself but only to a particular spirit in which, in his opinion, science happens to be pursued.

But – and this is the third level – Wittgenstein does sometimes display outright hostility to science as such. ‘It isn’t absurd’, he says, ‘to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that that is not how things are (Culture and Value, p. 56). That goes well beyond the first two levels of hostility. Admittedly, he doesn’t commit himself to the claim that there is literally nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge; he only says that that idea ‘isn’t absurd’.

http://www.socialsciencecollective.org/ ... s-science/

[Belligerent Savant]

.

The higher we soar in contemplation the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible … We pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, of thoughts as well as of words… . We mount upwards from below to that which is the highest, and according to the degree of transcendence, our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, in as much as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.
-- 6th-century monk Pseudo-Dionysius

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cr ... -a-mystic/

The more that science investigates reality, the weirder it seems.
...

Since childhood I have had moments of jaw-dropping astonishment that I or anything else exists. Psychedelics, which I started taking in my teens, amplified the feeling. The sensation of weirdness can have a positive or negative emotional valence. That is, it can be accompanied by ecstasy or terror. But after these emotions fade, I am still left with the intellectual conviction: everything really is weird.

Science, once I started learning and writing about it, corroborated this youthful intuition. Science has revealed that the origin of the universe, of life and of consciousness is each highly improbable. Multiply these improbabilities and they spike toward infinity.

... you might brood over how perilous our existence is, because you realize that non-existence is infinitely more probable than existence. But the improbability that triggers these emotions isn’t just in your head, it is out there. And so is the weirdness.

The problem is, many people don’t think the universe, life and consciousness are especially weird. When I talk to my students about the weirdness of existence, they often look baffled. They think I’m weird for insisting that existence is weird. And in fact leading thinkers believe that science has already told us so much about the world and about ourselves that it has dissipated the mystery of things.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett is a prime example. He has argued for decades that life and consciousness aren’t that weird. They are just results of physical processes. Science hasn’t pinned down all the details yet, but it’s just a matter of time. Consciousness will soon seem no weirder than digestion or metabolism. If you insist that things are fundamentally weird, Dennett implies, you must be some sort of flake.

Other philosophers disagree. In his 2013 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Thomas Nagel argues that conventional, materialistic science cannot account for the emergence of life and consciousness.

In a review of Dennett’s recent book From Bacteria to Bach Nagel states: “To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgement that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain.”

Philosopher Paul Feyerabend, when I interviewed him in 1992, was even more adamant that scientists aren’t figuring out reality. “This to me seems so crazy!” Feyerbend exclaimed. “It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing! ‘Ha ha! They think they have found me out!’”

This dispute has a parallel in the realm of spirituality. I recently posted profiles of two sages with divergent ideas about the state of insight known as enlightenment. For Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist, enlightenment consists of seeing “the sheer mystery of everything.” Far from getting answers to the mystery, you see “the massiveness of the question,” which fills you with “exhilaration and dread.”

The other sage, a philosopher and avid meditator whom I’ll call Mike, told me that he achieved the highest state of mystical enlightenment in 1995. The essential component of his worldview is a sense of oneness. “What you are, and what the world is, is now somehow a unit, unified,” Mike said.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cr ... weirdness/

[Iamwhomiam]

.

The higher we soar in contemplation the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible … We pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, of thoughts as well as of words… . We mount upwards from below to that which is the highest, and according to the degree of transcendence, our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, in as much as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.
-- 6th-century monk Pseudo-Dionysius

You didn't leave a link to the author's source of your first quote, BS. It is taken from Mystical Theology by Dionysius the Areopagite, who is also identified as Pseudo-Dionysius. Here's a link to its full text.

Mystical Theology http://esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/MysticalTheology.html

I have a copy of his writings on Cosmic Theology which I read many years ago while researching Christian belief in reincarnation during Christianity's formative years prior to the meeting of the Council of Nicea in 325CE.

The first quote reflects my view of reality as I have experienced it. This is the goal of all religions, though belonging to a religion is unnecessary to reach this goal. All you need is determination without desire.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
The quote was included in my first link above, actually, though your source is certainly a fuller, more direct link to his writings.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cr ... -a-mystic/

...To my mind, Tractatus is best viewed as a work of negative theology. This mystical branch of theology begins with the premise that God transcends understanding and description. Tractatus recalls the negative theology of Lao Tzu, Eckhart, Saint Theresa and the 6th-century monk Pseudo-Dionysius. The latter once wrote (and I found this passage in Nieli):

The higher we soar in contemplation the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible … We pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, of thoughts as well as of words… . We mount upwards from below to that which is the highest, and according to the degree of transcendence, our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, in as much as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.

[dada]

Science excels in the study of quantities, it's when it comes to purely qualitative data that science runs into trouble. Measuring quantities vs ranking qualities in order of importance. Science would be the scale, but whether the smaller or the greater weighted thing is ranked higher in importance, is the choice of justice. She just knows by feel.

Her arrangement is hieratic. I know some people balk at the idea of anything that smacks of hierarchy. A hieratic is a natural order, the mountain peak is at the top, the base is at the bottom, the climb is in the middle. Hierachy is a ranking of the quality of the views, the top has the most expansive view, the most breathtaking. The climb has some good views, too. Some you can't miss, others you definitely don't want to. At the base, a large part of the view is dominated by the mountain. Which is a pretty amazing view, in itself.

So instead of imagining a hierarchy of angels, an angelological science would study the angelic hieratic. Like a musical scale is not a hierarchy, but it is a hieratic. Or the progression of programming language. The progams we use today were built on complete, functioning languages, which in turn were built on complete, functioning languages. Each was necessary in the creation of the next one.

[Iamwhomiam]

.
The quote was included in my first link above, actually, though your source is certainly a fuller, more direct link to his writings.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cr ... -a-mystic/

...To my mind, Tractatus is best viewed as a work of negative theology. This mystical branch of theology begins with the premise that God transcends understanding and description. Tractatus recalls the negative theology of Lao Tzu, Eckhart, Saint Theresa and the 6th-century monk Pseudo-Dionysius. The latter once wrote (and I found this passage in Nieli):

The higher we soar in contemplation the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible … We pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, of thoughts as well as of words… . We mount upwards from below to that which is the highest, and according to the degree of transcendence, our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, in as much as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.

My apologies, BS. I erroneously omitted one word, "author's." Please read my edited comment above.

[dada]

"To my mind, Tractatus is best viewed as a work of negative theology. This mystical branch of theology begins with the premise that God transcends understanding and description. Tractatus recalls the negative theology of Lao Tzu, Eckhart, Saint Theresa and the 6th-century monk Pseudo-Dionysius"

Could also could include some islamic mystical theologists in the list. In terms of the quote, I'm saying that to be absorbed in the ineffable is to be absorbed in what transcends knowing. Being wholly voiceless in the ineffable, becoming 'wholly voiced' then is the 'first knowing,' that I'm calling the face of god, the highest thing I can know.

So as soon as a word is uttered, I've lost sight of the ineffable. Now the face has a voice, but the word is conceived in the ineffable behind the face, in the 'mind of god.' Later conceptions of the word are modelled after the first.