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Transgressing the Boundaries

BlueScreen

Fail 2.0
Joined
Nov 8, 2008
Messages
2,668
MBTI Type
YMCA
Reading the OP, I think science still works by the same principles it always did. And people still attempt to apply it to reality in the same way they always did.

It's not like people could solve every problem before quantum mechanics or relativity came along. Most of the formulae are okay in labs to figure out fundamentals and work in some systems outside the lab, but many systems are too chaotic to predict even if you know the formulae describing the parts. For a simple example, ask a scientist to predict what one of those swings with chains supporting a seat would be doing by the fifth swing if I gave it a push, or if it will rain on this day next month. Ask them to predict turbulance. And best of all, ask them to predict a system where the components think and choose what they will do.

I think social sciences make sense, but in these cases you need to be even more aware of the uncertainties and assumptions in what you are predicting. You are more or less making a more educated guess than you would if you had nothing to go by.

But that's all science. It's just rules to predict things. If you imagine that things you have never seen and could never see look certain ways or that the universe is your mathematical formulae, you've lost sight of what you are doing. You know these things by the evidence you have of them, and anything more that you see is a metaphoric projection of this evidence into the world with which are are familiar, usually to make thinking about them more natural.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Reading the OP, I think science still works by the same principles it always did. And people still attempt to apply it to reality in the same way they always did.

It's not like people could solve every problem before quantum mechanics or relativity came along. Most of the formulae are okay in labs to figure out fundamentals and work in some systems outside the lab, but many systems are too chaotic to predict even if you know the formulae describing the parts. For a simple example, ask a scientist to predict what one of those swings with chains supporting a seat would be doing by the fifth swing if I gave it a push, or if it will rain on this day next month. Ask them to predict turbulance. And best of all, ask them to predict a system where the components think and choose what they will do.

I think social sciences make sense, but in these cases you need to be even more aware of the uncertainties and assumptions in what you are predicting. You are more or less making a more educated guess than you would if you had nothing to go by.

But that's all science. It's just rules to predict things. If you imagine that things you have never seen and could never see look certain ways or that the universe is your mathematical formulae, you've lost sight of what you are doing. You know these things by the evidence you have of them, and anything more that you see is a metaphoric projection of this evidence into the world with which are are familiar, usually to make thinking about them more natural.

What is extraordinary is that science has enabled us to transcend our limitations: our limitation of size, our limitations of perception, and our limitations of thinking.

Of course most of the 7.1 thousand million alive today are limited by their size, their perceptions and their thoughts. So it is even more extraordinary that there is a tiny elite that has transcended their limitations.

However discretion suggests we avoid mentioning the limitations shared by most of us.
 

kendoiwan

I am Sofa King!!!
Joined
Dec 24, 2008
Messages
1,334
MBTI Type
IsTP
The one thing Neil deGrasse Tyson got wrong - Salon.com

Think of it this way: Philosophizing is all about properly framing the problems we want to solve, and then asking rigorous questions about them, looking at them from as many different angles as possible, leaving no stone unturned in the process; whereas Socratism is more like a dogma, when all those once-fluid philosophical values ironically congeal into a closed-minded credo. Scientism is basically an inordinate belief in the ability of the methods of science to definitively describe all of reality, and also that any questions that can’t be answered by science simply aren’t worth asking.
 

runvardh

にゃん
Joined
Jun 23, 2007
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8,541
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INFP
Enneagram
6w7
Instinctual Variant
sx/so
The article puts me in mind of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mage:_The_Ascension. Not meaning to joke around or anything; but that's where my head went to first.

Definitely not a new idea or set of ideas. Interesting way of putting it; but I don't believe thinking the world is flat is going to make it so for you (though over short distances you can "prove" that argument). I'd recommend using such things as a way to prompt thinking; but definitely not as instruction on how or what to think.
 
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