> I can predict which hospital will have better patient outcomes. That is quite besided the point. The point being every patient who goes there believes the hospital us doing western blah blah blah... Let me simplyfy it even more. The common mans dependence of "science" is based on beliefs. Just as it was on religion at an older time. That scientific method is more trust worthy, does not make that dependence not base…
You seem to be focused on the so-called common man and his inability to do anything more than just believe things. I think you do this common man an injustice. Let’s say this common man is religious (pick one) and is going about his day and is injured in some accident. He is taken to a hospital, and one which he knows is aligned with his religious beliefs. Upon arriving the doctors triage him and tell him he’s bleedi…
Sure, the common man can belive one thing more than other. Does not mean that their actions are not based on belief in both cases...
Aren't you guys truly not getting this simple thing? I should probably get out of this thread..
> The claims of a holy man are not. How come? The claims of holy men are verified by other holy men.
Except you can find another group of holy men who disagree with that group. And a third group that disagrees with those two groups. The number of groups ends up quite large, and nobody can quite seem to figure out a way to test whether one group has it a bit more right than the others.
> Except you can find another group of holy men who disagree with that group.
This happens in your "western science" also (despite all the ability to "test" things), he he he...excuse me. Couldn't help it.
Even secondary states might be impossible to explain, by the GP argument. > Yet there has to be an origin because an infinite history makes no sense. The origin has infinite history. > God must be laughing at us. No, because God is, like us, the descendant of something else, or else has infinite history. What if the history is cyclic? Then there is no origin.
>No, because God is, like us, the descendant of something else, or else has infinite history. God could have no beginning. This makes sense because God exists outside of our conception of spacetime. We have to have a beginning, because in the universe we live in the laws of time and nature say everything has to have a beginning.
1) You just rephrased 'God has infinite history' I don't see the point.
2) 'nature say everything has to have a beginning' uh??
If you imagine the Universe expanding then contracting cyclically where is the beginning?
> If the universe expands today, how does it follow that it was also expanding yesterday The universe is not only expanding, it's expanding faster and faster... it's very hard to see how anything could explain the rate of expansion could have started off negative, then instead of just collapsing into itself, it reverted somehow and then started accelerating. The simple explanation is that it has always expanded, thou…
I agree it is a simple plausible explanation and Occam's Razor argues that simple explanations are the most likely. So yes maybe it is the most likely explanation. But that is not the same as saying we know it is the explanation. Big Bang itself is a counter-intuitive explanation: Something came out of nothing.
> But that is not the same as saying we know it is the explanation.
No scientist says that. If evidence ever comes up against any scientific theory (and that's why we call it a theory) it's readily replaced with the most seemingly correct theory.
> Big Bang itself is a counter-intuitive explanation: Something came out of nothing.
Can a theory of creation exist that does not involve something coming out of nothing?
I don’t think people are understanding the subtlety of what she’s saying here. She’s saying that since there are no predictions to be made, there’s nothing falsifiable in any of the many theories. Worse, if the theories _do_ make falsifiable predictions that still will only reduce the imaginative space, not reduce it down to one theory, and that instead we choose between theories on the basis of how many “constants”…
Yes, but this is a generic rubric to apply to all frontiers of science: falsifiable theories are good; unfalsifiable theories are bad; even when you falsify a theory, there will always be room to fudge and rescue it by making it more baroque; the principle of parsimony should be applied to give less credence to baroque theories. I see no reason to place the frontier of "what happened right at / before the Big Bang wh…
There’s a couple of easy explanations for this 1) It’s her field of expertise 2) There aren’t any other frontiers of science where so much publicity and money is being spent on stuff that doesn’t look like it will ever advance science.
>religious babble Why is religion held in such contempt when there is so much science that is just as much "babble", but held in high regard?
I think the ratio of babble to sound reasoning is much better in science than in religion. That being said, there is also a lot of science babble and we should call it out and try to keep it at a as low amount as possible. The core tenets of science are pretty sound. Religions are based on a lot of completely made up stuff. They are not 100% bad of course. But we seriously can do much much better than that. I think t…
Science is not a replacement for religion because science is not a moral code. It can tell you how something can be done, but not what is right or wrong to do. Attempts to develop such moral codes by reasoning from first principles turns out to be incredibly difficult and can easily lead to degenerate conclusions.
In another comment you ask what scientism is. We can define it as an attempt to turn science into religion. It retains the surface look and feel of science, but isn't science. HN has a lot of people who follow scientism - you can find them getting frustrated on any story about science asking why other people can't just Believe The Scientists like they do.
The origin can’t be explained, because if it was explained it wouldn’t be the origin anymore. So the question of the origin is ill-posed. Yet there has to be an origin because an infinite history makes no sense. In the end, nothing makes sense. God must be laughing at us.
Even secondary states might be impossible to explain, by the GP argument. > Yet there has to be an origin because an infinite history makes no sense. The origin has infinite history. > God must be laughing at us. No, because God is, like us, the descendant of something else, or else has infinite history. What if the history is cyclic? Then there is no origin.
> What if the history is cyclic? Then there is no origin.
But what started the cycle?
I guess we as humans are the ones at fault here, because we can't accept something infinite as an answer in the real physical world.
After requesting the crack pipe from my fellow traveler, I conclude that the answer doesn’t matter. The universe Is.
Putting down my bong and loading another, I remark to the travelers that the human brain is the only set of atoms in the universe which wonders why they are there. All the other atoms seem perfectly happy to exist at all.
> only set of atoms in the universe
Being a passerby on the street after hearing someone say that while they grind their next dose, I stop and comment that that was an incredible narcissistic observation for someone from a species who hasn't even colonised another solar system yet.
This just falls completely apart when you look at the history of physics. Einstein for example is usually considered to be one of the smarter people, and even he thought it would be impossible to ever measure gravitational waves directly. He simply could not foresee the future developments of quantum mechanics, like lasers or squeezed light states. And yet here we are. Even if the author was the best physicist in the…
I hate this way of thinking. Einstein never thought that it's impossible to measure gravitational waves, he just couldn't imagine any way we could ever make instruments precise enough to do so. However, measuring the state of the singularity that probably existed before inflation, or even more so, measuring anything about how that in itself came to be, is explicitly impossible given our current theories. As impossibl…
You're falling into the exact argument trap you laid out yourself. Einstein had no clue what would be possible just 100 years later and just because we have no clue how to ever measure a singularity (which is actually not completely true, but let's not get into that) it would be very presumptuous of us to say that it will remain impossible another 100 years into the future. Just imagine if people kept listening to the guys who kept saying all the stuff we do today is impossible. Science is incremental steps - and we have to follow them disregarding of how worthwhile they might seem right now. Very rarely will someone come along and enable something directly that was thought impossible just recently. But over the long run, things work differently. Sure, we'll reach a lot of dead ends along the way while pursuing great things, but on the other hand we don't get anywhere at all by only listening to people who can't imagine anything.