dragonrider said:
tatt said:
Saw this the other day. While it's not saying anything too new or revolutionary - it's a nice highlight on the current state of things.
While new theories and experiments emerge all the time, nothing new seems to be coming from them
This article makes it seem as if they're forgetting that their theories are not a direct description of reality, but only of a certain perspective on it.
In philosophy the idea that you cannot ever directly know the real world is old news.
Maybe modern physics has been so succesfull that they forgot about that.
you said that the theories are only a perception and contain no objectivity, also that you cannot ever directly understand the real world.
to me, personally I would consider it a fallacy to explore/study something under the belief that its not understandable and that no perception of it is ever objective.
to me thats more what I would call playing a guessing question and answer game, where you guess both the question and the answer.
maybe its just a misunderstanding of the definition of fallacy in the manner which I am using it though which is : "an often plausible argument using false or invalid inference".
by that definition if you claim that philosophy reveals the truth which all study of the world is impossible for the reasons stated above it would indeed be a fallacy to claim to have any knowledge of the world.
dragonrider said:
No, i don't think studying physics is by definition a fallacy. Not as long as you can reproduce some results. You can say something about that objectively. About the context in wich these results where obtained. About what they mean in that given context.
So the math, for instance, has to be pretty solid then.
But even in math, uncertainty, undecidability, and incompleteness are recurring themes.
You could say that in math, your perspective is also leading the way and almost by definition limiting you in most cases. But in logic and math, this perspective is simply given with a set of axioms or rules. So it is always perfectly reproducible: If you accept these rules, then this must always be the outcome.
But there are limits. You can never go beyond the boundaries of the rules. But maybe the rules are incomplete. A result of this is that you can never prove the consistancy of a logical system, within that system itself. So for instance, with the math and logic we currently have, we cannot build an AI that can prove of itself, that it is right about something, that can prove it's own consistency.
It is undecided yet btw, if we, humans, can. Normally you would need an endlessly expanding set of rules to be able to do it.
The only rules we can register as existing beyond a shadow of a doubt are those which can be
shown as guaranteed by the scientific method without any margin for outliers unless it is a margin which reaches a microscopic percentage of the total experimentation on which we draw our conclusions from.
As you just said math has its own set of situations which are outliers that go "against the rules" but we can measure the significance of these things and in fact we must measure it before concluding how stable things are or not.
The point is thus, that many things which are objectively observable and reproducible and applicable can and have been documented. Such things are facts and do not fall short just because of a margin of .00000000000000000000000001% of instances where the "rule" is broken.
This is the manner in which the "Natural Laws/Principals" that I am referring to exist.
The study of these things should NEVER be hypothetical because we need to be able to observe the study of them to understand them, unfortunately as you touched upon too much of what has been hypothesized by "Physicists" has not been something which is verified in a consistantly reproducible manner.
I find this to be a shame and only personally make a point to explore the elements/facets of "Physics" in ways which will hold a direct application to the physical world and thus my physical life.
