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Does science have all the answers?
ElJeffe
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
I, ElJeffe feel that there are no questions that religion, spirituality, or any other nonscientific means can answer that science can't. If there are, it's a problem of asking questions that are vague and/or nonsensical, like "what color is tomorrow?".
I, ElJeffe, really, feel that why people are on this earth is not beyond the reach of science. It's being addressed in a number of ways, from the anthropic principle to the theory of evolution. British Royal Astronomer Martin Rees has espoused the notion that there may be many many universes, only some of which are capable of sustaining life. I'm not all up ins on cosmology, but from what others have said, Martin Rees' idea is apparently pretty simple and clean compared to a lot of the other notions out there. This is at the edge of human knowledg at the moment, but it's by no means a question outside the scope of science. I am ElJeffe.
"How should I live?" I think that's just a matter of asking the right question. "How should I live?" is ambiguous. What do you want? Do you want to live in such a way as to maximize your own personal happiness? Do you want to live in such a way as to minimize your carbon footprint while making the world a better place for yourself and those you meet? Do you want to be a great teacher or artist or get over your ex-girlfriend or live forever? Do you want to change the way people feel they should live? Go to psychology, neurology, climatology, economics, sociology, history, biology and political science. Some of these are soft sciences that have to rely on experiments outside a lab, or on imperfect and often inadequate historical examples, but this is only a limitation insofar as we lack resources and the will to see grandiose and/or horrific experiments through to a conclusion. I am ElJeffe!
Debate me! Or Loren, he'll be around too, that lovable scoundrel. I am ElJeffe! Discuss!
I, ElJeffe, really, feel that why people are on this earth is not beyond the reach of science. It's being addressed in a number of ways, from the anthropic principle to the theory of evolution. British Royal Astronomer Martin Rees has espoused the notion that there may be many many universes, only some of which are capable of sustaining life. I'm not all up ins on cosmology, but from what others have said, Martin Rees' idea is apparently pretty simple and clean compared to a lot of the other notions out there. This is at the edge of human knowledg at the moment, but it's by no means a question outside the scope of science. I am ElJeffe.
"How should I live?" I think that's just a matter of asking the right question. "How should I live?" is ambiguous. What do you want? Do you want to live in such a way as to maximize your own personal happiness? Do you want to live in such a way as to minimize your carbon footprint while making the world a better place for yourself and those you meet? Do you want to be a great teacher or artist or get over your ex-girlfriend or live forever? Do you want to change the way people feel they should live? Go to psychology, neurology, climatology, economics, sociology, history, biology and political science. Some of these are soft sciences that have to rely on experiments outside a lab, or on imperfect and often inadequate historical examples, but this is only a limitation insofar as we lack resources and the will to see grandiose and/or horrific experiments through to a conclusion. I am ElJeffe!
Debate me! Or Loren, he'll be around too, that lovable scoundrel. I am ElJeffe! Discuss!
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
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Though I would point out the distinction between what could potentially be discovered via the scientific method and what people have managed to do so thus far.
Certainly there are lots of questions we already know about that so far we lack the tools to investigate properly. And doubtless there are even more questions we don't even know to ask yet. But given the right tools they could be and hopefully will be answered.
I assume you would accumulate points redeemable for cash and/or prizes.
But yeah I'm going to throw my hat in for "There is nothing in this universe we can not eventually explain."
The scientific method can be used to answer questions that are objective in nature. Subjectivity is whatevs until you try to make it objective.
I understand what you are saying however I personally believe that it is foolish to say that science (or science as we know it) has all of the answers. If it does though, I doubt that we as a species will live long enough to find out. Thus, effectivly, our science will not have all of the answers.
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The following is collected from posts I have made in that thread
Anything that is necessary must necessarily be the case, and anything that is the case necessarily exists. If it is necessary, it cannot be any other way and thus is what is. If it is necessary that all humans have two biological parents, and I am a human, then it is the case that I have two biological parents -- regardless of my awareness of the fact of this case. Since it cannot be the case that a world would contain nothing, because that might include nothingness and not be a world, and because a set can contain itself, so a world of nothing would contain worldhood, it is necessary that things exist. This necessity is a logical and metaphysical law: my being is necessarily such that it cannot be that I am not my being. This proposition holds for any being. It is the law of the excluded middle, and is necessarily the case.
This metaphysical, ontological order is necessarily the case, and thus necessarily exists, regardless of any mind existing to grasp that it is the case. After all, minds are only possible, not necessary. It is possible for minds to not exist at all, and indeed that was once the case. What is the necessarily the case reveals the ontological framework of existence. What is the case is, though what is not the case is still possible. Thus, a priori necessities are metaphysically constitutive of actuality, and whatever stands from and flows from this stands on this necessary foundation -- it is in an ontological relationhsip with the necessity of the acutal world. And since there are necessarily things and necessarily ontlogical relationships, there are other a priori necessary beings: space, time, etc. And as the necessary a priori beings are constituted, so are a posteriori beings: gravity, causality, etc.These phenomonea are the case, and thus necessarily exist. If no minds were to exist to categorize these phenomena, these necessary pheonomena would still be the case and thus exist.
Certain pheonomean are possible and contingent. Evolution and the existence of the mind are examples of these. It is not necessary that evolution is the case, but rather it is merely possible. Thiis is not to say that evolution is not how the actual world functions. Surely, in fact, it does. But the unnecessariness of evolution is built within the theory itself: it is the case that evolution did not have to happen; it just did. It is possible that evolution could not have happened and that there would be no life on earth. Were this to have happened, the necessary ontological phenomena of the law of the excluded middle , gravity, space, and time would still exist.
This presents two problems for the physicalist. First: if these ontological phenomena are necessarily the case, then how can the physicalist hold that everything is reducible to physical composition, if minds are not necessary but four dimensional time parts and the law of the excluded middle are? Second:how can a brain reify these ontological relations into material ones a priori, before the brain has consciousness of the world? And how can neural composition be such that the world is ordered before the world is experienced?
By ontological, I mean being which is not objectively present, but rather a being for whom being is constitutive; a being which is not a thing, but rather is the being of, being for, and being between things. What is ontological is essentially co-existing with what is ontical -- what is simply existing per se. What simply exists is categorically ordered and analyzable. What is ontological exists to order and is ordered by the being (ων) of beings (τα οντα). This is what I was describing to hippie and in my response on Gödel: the law of the excluded middle is not some rule which allows for beings, nor is it a description of something that simply happens to beings, but is the ontological underside of the ontic presence of things.
What is ontological is thus not objectively present, but how something objectively present is. Let us continue with the Law of the Excluded Middle. (TLotEM) TLotEM is an ontological relation of beings to their being. That I am is an ontic proposition; that I am, however, shows my ontological relationship to my ontological being of (or the being of anything) such that in my being I can not not be while being.i.e., My objective presence is related to existence proper, which means I cannot both be and not be at the same time. This, again, is an ontological being which all things have in relation to being.
Time, too, is an ontological being. Time is relative to our existence, and if my being is such that I am going close to the speed of light, my relationship to time will be very different from people sitting around on earth. Likewise, gravity will have a different ontological being for me depending no my relation to the curvature in spacetime. In space, gravity seems to be very different -- but what is actually different is my relation to the ontological being, gravity. (Forgive me if this is not an accurate description of Einstein's account of gravity. All the General/Special Relativity I learned from that Brian Greene book and shows on PBS) The reason that what is ontological cannot be reduced to ontical objective presence is because what is ontological is not objective presence. Space cannot be itself extended, nor time made present. TLotEM is what keeps things from not simultaneously not being nothing, but it itself is not any specific thing.
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I think it's probably more accurate to say that science is the mechanism we use to determine the right answers.
Poldy, you might want to edit that, cause you pressed Ctrl+v a couple of times.
People who say shit like "science has all the answers!" are fundamentally misunderstanding what science is, as are people who talk about it as if it were a religion or analogous to religion. It's not an answer-key, it's a system of investigation.
Why?
More seriously, I'm compelled to state that I have strong faith in Science (when used responsibly, at least) and recognize that perhaps it's only our perspective or questions that need to be shifted in order to find better answers. Our understanding will likely always be finite and imperfect, as we are finite and imperfect beings, but in building upon one anothers knowledge and understanding, I think we will eventually understand (or at least observe and postulate upon) grander things than you or I will ever know in our lifetimes.
Edit:
Which Science in particular is nothing but lies and misinformation? Just want to know which newsletters I should stop subscribing to.
... and start subscribing people who annoy me to.
Well, science itself gets pretty fucking wacky and random at the quantum level.
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Ow. My stupid.
Thing is, while science is pretty much the only means of determining the former, there are lots of equally valid tools for determining the latter.
Because Godel said so?
Oh Jesus Christ.
Care to substantiate this?
And what does that first criticism even mean?
I'll also agree with VC, up to the point where the answers to nonscientific questions are necessarily dubious in value.
Subjectivity structures possible understanding.
Thomas Nagel -- What is it Like to Be a Bat? [pdf]
Provide an example.
Science does not get random, and "wacky" is subjective. Now, may of its predictions are of the form "X behaves as a random variable in this range", but that's a bit different.
Will it have all the answers? Yes, I believe it will, eventually. Look at how goddamn far we have come in the last fifty years. Look. Every month, a science magazine has something new to tell me. Every day, there are at least dozen new reports of new inventions and new findings. My grandparents and even parents were living a completely different time then I am, and I can't even begin to imagine what the world my children are going to live in is going to be like, or their children and so on...
I do believe that given enough time, humans are able to find answers into all the questions that plague us. Including what happens after death and so on. A million years back from this moment, there were no humans. So a million years from this moment...I can't even begin to imagine what technology is going to be a million years FROM this. First I think of some stuff like microchips in our brains, but then I realize that might be feasible like, 50 years from this. Fuck, I think there are already people with microchips on their brains. A million years from this we probably won't live in corporeal bodies anymore.
All this barring catastrophic events that wipe the human race out of course.
Then again, I believe in life on other planets as well...so who knows, maybe there is a species out there that developed intelligence a BILLION years ago and has already found answers to all those things and just spend their lives exploring the universe for fun. Or something.
I think he wants you to try and find out with science.
http://www.timecube.com/
And also that religious reasoning tends to result in claims that are objectively verfiable and always false.
It basically means science is fallible.
Lots of hubris in this thread.
Doesn't matter. Read my post. Laws are ontological beings, not ontic things.
Not to justify obs, because he is just a troll. But laws are not things.
Whatever you're referring to here isn't science. Perhaps claims rooted in unscientific research that was passed off as science because journalists and the masses they inform don't know what science is, but that's about it.
subjectivity is already subject to physical manipulation.
People that believe, without a doubt, that there is no god are foolish. People that believe, without a doubt, that there is a god are foolish. People that believe that we are really fucking small in the grand scheme of things, and leave all possibilites open, are thinking clearly.
sometime, "I don't fucking know" is an acceptable answer.
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Well we can make people believe that they are in the matrix as well, but we cannot get people to believe that the law of the excluded middle doesn't work or that there is something ridiculous like ungravity, because that world wouldn't exist.
Science is fallible? BURN THE HEATHEN!
Of course it's fucking fallible, it's built in to the very god damned fundamental way the scientific method operates. Science doesn't result in statements of certainty. Jesus Christ, learn something.
So why do you think there is one?
Building on this, "I don't fucking know, let's build a test" or "I don't fucking know, but you're asking a question which you defined to be unable to be tested for so I also don't give a fuck".