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Author Topic:   Does Science Truly Represent Reality?
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1466 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 3 of 61 (414851)
08-06-2007 4:38 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by GDR
08-06-2007 3:58 PM


Does Science Truly Represent Reality?
If it doesn't, nothing does.
We have evolved from single celled life forms, (with or without God), into beings with consciousness and with 5 basic senses.
We have a few more than five, I'm just saying, but I grasp your basic point.
But consider that each of those senses work the same way - by detecting physical changes caused by the outside world. Reality isn't something that's "out there"; it's in your eyes and ears and your skin. A photon comes right into your eye to be seen. Sound waves enter right into your eardrum to be detected by your ears. When you touch something, it's right there on your skin.
Even the brain itself - your very consciousness, your self - is right there in reality; it's not insulated from it. Your ability to be yourself comes from the fact that the cells in your brain are operating according to the same laws of physics and chemistry that we observe in reality.
So an argument that we're somehow insulated from - separate from - reality is probably a non-starter. We're able to perceive reality because we're in reality. Where else would we be?
Maybe if we had additional senses we would perceive a whole other world out there that we don’t even know exists.
We do have such senses, thanks to technology, and we have used them to see other worlds out there - the world of the atom, for instance, or the enormous universe that we inhabit.
In the end science is another level of faith. Science is required to have faith that our perception of things represents reality but there is no empirical proof that this is actually so.
You have a funny definition of "faith." Faith is when you believe in something despite all the evidence that you're wrong. Faith is absolute and unquestioned; to take something on faith is to believe it no matter what you learn or what you find out. In faith, if you change your mind in response to new evidence, you're considered to have lost faith.
In science, the things we believe to be true about the universe are constantly set against new observations; and when we accrue observations that suggest that we're wrong, we abandon the old models in favor of new ones.
Is that faith? To change one's mind at the slightest indication that one is wrong? Science is highly distrustful of theory, of model - even of observation, because we know people can fabricate claims of observation. I don't see that there could possibly be any endeavor so faithless as science, where long-cherished belief is abandoned at the slightest evidentiary wrinkle.
Someone who walked into church with the same attitude scientists have about theory - "I'll believe in your God for now, but if the mosque down the street makes better pancakes, I'm totally becoming Muslim" - would be accused of being faithless. Feckless. How then can we say that science requires faith?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by GDR, posted 08-06-2007 3:58 PM GDR has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 5 by GDR, posted 08-06-2007 5:26 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1466 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 9 of 61 (414864)
08-06-2007 6:04 PM
Reply to: Message 5 by GDR
08-06-2007 5:26 PM


As I said, in looking at my desk I would never perceive that the reality is that it is really nothing of nothing but dimensionless, (or at least near dimensionless particles) and empty space.
Sure. But not because your senses are lying to you with fictitious inputs; just because your senses have certain limitations. That you can't hear the color blue, for instance, is not evidence that your sense of hearing doesn't actually have anything to do with reality.
What other senses have we used?
Well, for instance, a magnetic sense that tells you where north is.
But really any time you're looking at a pressure gauge, or a radiation meter, or a spectrum analyzer, you're using a tool that extends your senses. That's the purpose of such technology.
Science though requires faith that our perception of things is the only way that those same things can be perceived and thus represent the only reality that there is.
I don't see that science requires that at all. Consider that all physicists currently accept that both general relativity and quantum mechanics are accurate models of the universe, yet those are two models that are completely inconsistent with each other. That's two very different ways of looking at things, so clearly science makes no demand that one or another model be accepted as "the only way."

This message is a reply to:
 Message 5 by GDR, posted 08-06-2007 5:26 PM GDR has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 11 by GDR, posted 08-06-2007 7:28 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1466 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 19 of 61 (414984)
08-07-2007 1:58 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by GDR
08-06-2007 7:28 PM


I realize that there is no answer as we have no way of knowing if there are other ways of perceiving the universe --- or not.
Well, but clearly anybody who's ever looked through an infrared imager has found a new way of perceiving the universe - via technology.
If vision was not a part of our experience we would have no way of knowing what vision is or even be able to contemplate it.
I disagree. The key feature of the human brain is its plasticity in nearly every stage of the human life cycle. Did you read the article I linked to? The feelSpace researcher actually developed a magnetic sense. It wasn't just that he felt the buzzing around his waist and consciously interpreted that as "north." Within only a few days it was literally just that his brain knew where north was, and he only felt the buzzing indicators if he specifically concentrated on doing so.
Another researcher was able to see objects and doors in a room by means of an imaging device attached to his tongue. He was literally seeing by the sensation of electric shocks on his tongue. At the end of the experiment, he had no memory of the feeling of the room on his tongue; what he remembered is what the room looked like.
So the brain's capability to develop new senses is clearly considerable. Even if we did not have vision - if we only had touch or hearing - a technology that turned visible light patterns into acoustic or tactile patterns could train our brains to interpret those patterns, seamlessly, as visual information.
It seems to me as evidenced by Oscar the Cat that there is stuff going on that we know nothing about as we don't know what we don't know.
Oh, for God's sake. Oscar the Cat is a ridiculous hoax perpetrated on people who don't know how to think things through. Look, think it through:
1) The Steere Nursing Unit where Oscar lives treats only individuals in the end-stage of various fatal illnesses - so regardless of whether Oscar sleeps on them or not, most residents there are going to die fairly soon. They're already dying.
2) Cats like to sleep on quiet, warm spots where they won't be disturbed. People who are dying of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's are listless, generally unaware of their surroundings, unresponsive and uncommunicative, and may already be suffering from fevers or blood issues that make their skin warmer than the surroundings.
3) People who are dying experience metabolic shutdowns that release certain distinct odors. Cats have an incredible sense of smell, and Oscar is invariably rewarded for his attention to a dying person, so doubtless he's been behaviorally trained to pay attention to those odors.
There's nothing spooky or magic about it. It certainly doesn't prove that cats can see into the future, or read energy flows, or do any of the other ridiculous superstitious bullshit that people have attributed to Oscar the cat.
Is there stuff going on that we don't know about? Sure. But the problem here isn't that we don't know what we don't know. The problem here is that you don't know what we know.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 11 by GDR, posted 08-06-2007 7:28 PM GDR has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 21 by GDR, posted 08-07-2007 6:19 PM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1466 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 29 of 61 (415048)
08-07-2007 10:41 PM
Reply to: Message 21 by GDR
08-07-2007 6:19 PM


Well it fooled the publishers of "The New England Journal of Medicine" so I figure I'm in pretty good company.
Fooled them how? Not even the editors of the NEJM attributed Oscar's behavior to magic, like you just did.
It seems to me that with technology we can develop ways of expanding the existing senses.
No, you're still not hearing me. Are you paying attention to what I'm writing?
It isn't just that our existing senses are expanded. The guy with the feelSpace belt - and I wonder if you really did read the article, because they made every effort to stress this - didn't just read a compass by feeling it. He didn't just "extend" his sense of touch into magnetic sense.
What he extended was his brain. Sure, the interface was tactile - but it was also transparent to him. From his perspective, he wasn't at all wearing a belt that indicated north via touch - he was wearing a belt that indicated north in his brain.
That's what you're still not getting, it seems like. That it's not that we're just extending our current senses in new directions. We have the technology to create entirely new senses that the brain registers as something else beyond sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, temperature, or proprioception. These technologies use our current senses as transparent channels. It's not simply a matter of converting information into something our senses can detect. It's about using our senses to connect our minds to sensors.
He is able to discern which deaths are really imminent and disregard the others.
Everybody's death is imminent if you're at the Steere Nursing Unit. That's the point of the unit; it houses the dying. The nurses are all busy tending to people so naturally the cat doesn't sit on any of them.
Do you really think that the cat should on this basis be able to tell the difference between somebody 2 hrs from death to someone who is 24 hrs from death.
Obviously. We have no idea how often the cat just gets lucky, incidentally. You've never heard of "confirmation bias"? You have no idea how many times the nurses are forgetting that they saw Oscar sitting on the lap of Old Man Perkins, who's been there for weeks. You have no idea how many times they've seen the cat curled up in a sunbeam or on the lap of a little girl (who presumably is not near to death.) It's real easy to invent the legend of a death-predicting cat when you forget every single time the cat has been wrong.
Christ haven't you ever seen John Edward on TV? (The "medium", not the politician.) Don't you know how those scams work? He guesses things out loud until he gets something right, and then everybody forgets how often he was wrong, because they're all committed to believing that he has supernatural powers.
You know, like you and this fucking stupid cat.
He started doing this on his own so he couldn't have been trained using a reward system.
Wrong again. He's rewarded every time he does it. So the first few times he did it by random, or because they were the warmer laps of people dying of fevers; once he was rewarded for doing so, obviously he continued doing it. Clearly you're as ignorant about behavioral conditioning as you seem to be about everything else. No wonder you fall for bullshit like this.
You seem to approach all subjects with the certain knowledge that there is nothing that given enough time the human mind can't discern. I happen to think that you're wrong.
I haven't been, yet. Since there's no possible way to distinguish between the things we don't know because we'll never know, and the things we don't know because we simply don't know them yet, it's as reasonable an assumption as anything else. And, as yet, I've never been proven wrong.
But look, you're really getting way ahead of yourself worrying about the stuff mankind may or may not ever know. There's a whole world of information that rest of us know that you don't. You should be trying to catch up a little bit before you go worrying about the limits of human cognition. You're not exactly at a place where you're pushing those limits yet.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 21 by GDR, posted 08-07-2007 6:19 PM GDR has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 30 by Archer Opteryx, posted 08-08-2007 3:11 AM crashfrog has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1466 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 36 of 61 (415165)
08-08-2007 2:58 PM
Reply to: Message 30 by Archer Opteryx
08-08-2007 3:11 AM


How delightful, AO. You've managed to roll ad hominem, strawmen, begging the question, argument from ignorance, and just plain wrong-headedness into one steaming pile of a post. Congratulations on your accomplishment!
Most individuals admit the question remains open. We don't know.
Can't know, probably. But that's not an excuse to jump to whatever woo conclusion one would like to - like, "there's a cat in the Steere Nursing Unit who can see the future."
Or "there's a God, and he's called Jesus." Or "dead people come back as ghosts." The limits of human empirical knowledge are not an excuse to just make up whatever is past those boundaries, but that's exactly what GDR is trying to do - we don't know everything, therefore we can just make up things like Gods and ghosts.
Science is limited to empiricism by definition. It can only take account of data it can admit. Confirmation bias, as crash notes.
That's not what confirmation bias is. I wonder if this is the same level of ignorance from which you approach everything else. It certainly obviates any claim on your part to be engaged in
a reasoned analysis of comprehensive data.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 30 by Archer Opteryx, posted 08-08-2007 3:11 AM Archer Opteryx has not replied

  
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