On 13/01/2021 20:56, TimS wrote:
> On 13 Jan 2021 at 19:46:28 GMT, The Natural Philosopher 
> wrote:
>
>> On 13/01/2021 18:33, Jim H wrote:
>>>   I don't buy the*TOTAL*  debunking of anything based only on "we can
>>>   never know for sure and thus everything is only belief." This is
>>>   little more than sophistry in my book. The smart money goes with
>>>   widely accepted (among scientists) science as being correct at least
>>>   as far as it goes. There always seems to be more that builds on what
>>>   is already known. Rarely, at least in the last several centuries, does
>>>   it throw everything we "know" into a cocked hat.
>> The problem is deep and you are sweeping it under the carpet, and it
>> goes to the heart of all 'knowledge' about the world, because all of it
>> is ultimately *models* - inductive propositions that are more or less
>> useful.  Nowhere in any of it is there the solid testability that allows
>> us to call it 'truth'.
>>
>> The real point here is not to dismantle ordinary knowledge that works
>> pretty well, but to make us aware that ordinary knowledge that works
>> pretty well is not the only take we can have on the universe. It is the
>> antidote to 'One True Stickiness' that forces people to believe that
>> they have it right, and other people have it wrong.
>>
>> Is Einstein truth, or just a model? - if truth then how come we believed
>> in Newton?
>
> Newton's gravity did as good a job as could be measured against at the time.
> The anomaly pointed up by the precession of the axis of Mercury's orbit
hadn't
> been noticed yet, and it was a *huge* advance on what went before.
>
> Remember also that if you simplify Einstein's theory (presumably by setting
> speed of light to infinity), then AIUI Einstein's theory simplifies down to
> exactly Newton. So there's no real conflict.
>
You are not looking at this from Jim's position. He claims that one or
the other or both are 'demonstrably true'.

And it makes a huge difference. Consider climateChange™. We have three
hypotheses, let's say:

(i) Its all just natural variation in a chaotic system. Nothing can or
need be done except get used to it.
(ii) It's all man made CO2 so we should shut down civilisation to stop
it, maybe, in a hundred years.
(iii) Its down to high flying aircraft contrails, so we should just stop
flying.

Of these the only currently  *testable* one is (iii) and when air
transport did shut down post 911 there were in fact colder nights in the
USA. And post Covid 19 shutdown there has been a rather cold northern
hemisphere winter.

Yet how many people here would claim that one of these is 'demonstrably
true'?

Or the 'science is settled'

The distinction between a plausible theory, that can't be tested easily
if at all, and a plausible theory that gives the right answer, and the
truth, is very, very, wide indeed. When it comes down to a trillion
dollar industry worldwide.

In the case of gravity, for most practical purposes at a human level
scale it doesn't matter. The canard that "gravity is real and
demonstrably exists in the RealWorld™, just like Newton said" is not a
lie of serious consequence.

The problem is that as long as people *think* that science is about
establishing 'demonstrable truth' and think in the general case that
knowledge is 'demonstrable truth' about the world, then the mere naming
of something by a man from a University, turns the most arrant nonsense
into 'fact' - especially if he has a white coat on. Or lots of letters
after his name, and if a collection of men from universities all say the
same, and so do the  computers they have programmed, like the Bandar Log
in Kipling's Jungle book ("we all say it, so it must be true") why then,
it's *more* than true, its peer-reviewed 99.7% consensus guaranteed gold
plated FACT. Isn't it?

It gets worse.

 From Eugenics to Lysenkoism, and to current theories of the lack of
importance of e.g. race, we see that theories held to be facts are used
politically to justify massive impacts on society. The Nazis used racial
superiority  to justify genocide, today we use racial equality to
justify positive discrimination, after all the only reason black people
don't perform academically as well as white has to be "systemic racism"
doesn't it?

Then how come half the top physicists and concert violinists in the
world are in fact of _Asian_ origin ?

My gripe is that this lazy thinking that starts in Physics, that
hypothetical ideas *about* the world are in fact truths *in* the world,
is not mere sophistry. This is an  ingrained habit that results in the
vast majority of people who are educated enough to know better thinking
in terms of 'established truths *in* the world' when in fact they may be
no more than half baked propaganda in their *minds*.

Korzybski once coined a phrase 'the map is not the territory'. Knowledge
is  maps of the world. If you start regarding it as the territory
itself, you end up in all sorts of trouble.

Just because its clearly marked on the map doesn't mean its there on the
ground, conversely maps are for specific purposes and what is
fundamentally as useful as what is on them is what is left off them as
'too much detail'....

But going back to Einstein. Its not just a matter of Einstein giving
slightly better results than Newton, it is a paradigm shift in our
actual understanding of the whole world.

Einstein refuted time as a primary axis on the map.  Time as a concept
wasn't what we thought it was. It  couldn't be, The idea that even if we
couldn't see it and weren't there to hear it, a tree falling on a planet
in a distant galaxy receding from us at n billion parsecs a second, or
whatever, did in fact fall at a given exactly precise-for-all-who-cared
time post the big bang, flew out of the window.

Time was relative to the observer.

Worse, space wasn't flat either. It was bent, depending on what was
sitting on it.

Never mind. We still had causality, didn't we?

Einstein clung on to that one "God does not play dice". And yet
probability theory fitted the quantum  'facts' as observed, better.

This has upset so many physicists that a large number declared
themselves 'instrumentalists' and said that they were not even going to
argue what was real and what was not, as long as their mathematical
models gave the right results recorded on their instruments. Shades of
the Catholic church and Galileo. Never mind reality it's just a
*mathematical model*.

My axe to grind is that all this is far far easier to come to terms with
if, instead of thinking in terms of a reality that is fixed and *out
there*, we humble ourselves and realise that in fact our realities are
all mutable and *in here*.  Now they may well be, and it's certainly a
reasonable hypothesis, to regard them as, more or less accurate *maps*
of what is 'out there'. Babies and bathwater, but consider the
possibility that what is actually *out there* is as unknown as the true
nature of the Matrix, and what you see is in fact just your own minds
virtual reality simulation...space, time, energy, materiality,
causality. None of these exist outside of our minds. They are just the
axes on our own personal maps. Our way of organising and categorising
experience into a coherent world-view.

Today we have conflicts between people who consider that 'truth is
relative to culture' (which is to my mind a perfectly valid way of
expressing a something about the way that different cultures draw
different maps of what is we presume the same reality, but who are not
astute enough [being students of the humanities] to realise that that
does not mean that the truth is 'whatever we think it is' and therefore
by mounting massive propaganda campaigns [political correctness] telling
us how to think, the underlying reality will in fact change and men will
become women, just by choosing to think they are], and between those who
say that, no, magic *doesn't* work, and the world is whatever it is,
irrespective of how we think about it, and science reveals it.

The resolution of that conflict, is as I have described. The halfway
house between idealism and realism. The metaphysics of Kant,
Schopenhauer, Korzybski. To regard the *world as we know it* as a
hierarchy of models, that do indeed reflect the nature of a world as we
*presume it really is*, but which are forever inexact, approximate, ad
hoc and pro tem, and are never *ever* to be regarded as the One True
Stick. And if someone claims that his ideas are, then he should be hung
drawn and quartered and his head stuck on a pole.

I think we desperately need to if not adopt this view, to at least
understand it. We are being bombarded with fake news and propaganda from
all sides of every political spectrum there is, for purposes of exacting
our votes and our wallets. So called 'scientific truths' are rammed into
our faces to justify massive expenditures and political changes.
Computer models are held to be more real than the experience of our own
lives, and the weather has become not what is outside the window, but
whatever the clever man on the telly says it is.

In short metaphysics really really matters. It's not 'mere sophistry'
because it underpins the absolute complete way in which we understand
the world, and if we are using a worn out and past its sell by date
metaphysics, like Materialism, we have no defence against the New
Idealists, who tell us that pixie dust and Unicorn farts will run the
world as long as we *believe in theme enough*.

And remember, in the world of human behaviour, it is as approximately
true that what people believe in governs their behaviour, as it is
approximately true that in the world of classical physics belief has no
effect whatsoever.



--
There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do
that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon
emissions and more adverse environmental impact by adding intermittent
renewable energy.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05