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pedanterrific comments on No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know - Less Wrong
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So that the statements are in order of profundity. That way each has the opportunity to startle. I had no reaction to 5) because I was still recovering from 4). Consider, if the first item on the list was about "the Atomic Flux operating Near the God", would you have had any reaction to "SCIENCE may not be able to know...the phenomena of Soul/consciousness"?
Now, that's not very nice. rudru47 spelled "know" correctly.
What I like best about 4) is the (presumably unintended) implication that SCIENCE can, in fact, know the depth of the universe.
Spelling fixed.
The idea that something's changing makes it impossible to know is an extreme case of collapsing levels.
I know it's pedant(errif)ic of me to point out, but it seems poor epistemic hygiene to let equivocations pass by unremarked:
is a very different claim from
For one, the sort of person who places limits on SCIENCE's grasp usually has some mechanism in mind which makes it possible to bypass them (really good drugs, for instance). For two, I don't see any assertion of a causal relationship between the Universe's ever-changingness and SCIENCE's inability to put a tape measure to it. For three, I'm struggling to come up with a way to know the Universe is changing without being able to measure it.
What?
What if it had read "the length and width of Universe, which is big"?
That is, the sort of New Agey people that tend to say "Science can never understand the nature of the soul!" don't mean that the soul can never be understood, just that understanding it requires divine revelation / seeing past the veil of Maya / altered mindstates corresponding suspiciously to the effects of LSD.
Oh, I see - I parsed "Universe, which is ever changing" as a catechistic epithet, a la "Atomic Flux operating Near the God" or "Holy Mary, mother of God". It could be an implication of causality, but it still doesn't seem certain.
Good point. Sometimes they might mean one and other times the other.