= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jiro comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (391)
If fires didn't burn orphans, it may be technically true that science couldn't prove it was caused by a God, but that's because science can't prove anything. Science certainly could rule out other explanations to the extent that a godlike being is pretty much the only reasonable possibility left. Science could discover that fires not burning orphans seemed to be a fundamental law of the universe that can't be explained in terms of other laws. And a fundamental law of the universe that operates in terms of complicated human conceptual categories like "orphan" is a miracle.
You seem to think that science could never prove this is a miracle because science would just keep coming up with other theories (that would eventually be disproven). If that was actually true, no scientist would be able to conclude that anything is a fundamental law of the universe at all, whether miraculous or non-miraculous, since the scientist would keep coming up with theories that explain the law in terms of something else. In fact, at some point the scientist will run out of likely theories and will only be able to come up with theories so unlikely that "this is not based on some other law" is more reasonable.
They might not eventually be disproven, or they might take a very long time to disprove. Consider; we know that both general relativity and quantum mechanics are very, very, very good at predicting the universe as we know it. We also know that they are mutually incompatible in certain very hard-to-test situations; they cannot both be true (and it is quite possible that neither, in their current form, is completely true). Yet neither has, to the best of my knowledge, been disproven.
Well, we don't actually have the fundamental laws of the universe yet. Once quantum gravity's been sorted out, then we might be there.
I'm not sure that I can expect anyone in my example counterfactual universe to have done any better than we've done in the real historical universe.
We have laws that are relatively more fundamental than others, and my argument doesn't require that the law be fundamental in an absolute sense. If scientists discovered that orphans are fireproof, and ran out of explanations for why the category "orphans" is part of the rule, they would essentially have proven it's supernatural, even if, oh, they don't rule out the possibility that both orphans and priests are fireproof.
Why would they run out of explanations? All that leads to is "we don't know why yet, but we'll think of something".
And maybe trying to get funding for a bigger particle accelerator.
Proving things to 100% certainty requires running out of explanations. Proving things to reasonable certainty only requires running out of reasonable explanations, and that's certainly possible. And the latter is all that people mean when they speak of science proving something--science never proves anything to 100% certainty anyway.
We have the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. We have time and space twisting around in order to preserve the constancy of the speed of light. We have subatomic particles whose position is an approximation if their velocity is known.
The bar for 'reasonable' in scientific endeavours is 'it led to a number of predictions and, when we did the experiments, the predictions turned out to be all correct'.
The disadvantage, from a scientific point of view, of the 'it was all a miracle' explanation is that it doesn't lead to much in the way of useful predictions which can be checked. This makes experimental verification somewhat tricky. I don't think a scientific theory can be considered reasonably certain without at least a little experimental verification (and simply repeating the observation that led to the development of the theory doesn't count, because any theory that attempts to explain that observation will explain it).