marcusmorgan

I agree that nature might even be entirely deterministic, but only statistically in particle & field behaviour, and ways poorly understood in biology, but that is not the point. It is obvious that we are resoning to a deductive conclusion because we hope that the solution, if there is one (a Unified Theory for example) explains a self-consistent state and our path to discovering it. The entire point is that in the practical journey to this hopeful order we use inductive creativity that is as open as we need to gather and refine into a stricter theory. I think you have set up a straw man argument against me, and your answer... (read more)

I am a new member and have been looking at Blogs for the first time over the past few weeks. I have written a book, finished last month, which deals with many of the issues about reasoning discussed at this site, but I attempt to cut through them somewhat, as there is so much potential in the facts out there to be ordered that I don't spend a lot of time considering the theory relating to my reasoning in providing some order to it in my book. I discuss reasoning, and many of the principles raised in posts here, but my interest is in reasonably framing the conditions of my hypotheses and... (read more)

I would say reasoning is a satisfying process towards secure knowledge from beliefs that might have any bases. Reasoning itself, by creative induction and strict deduction to confirm it, is a process that provides our ability to progress, and it is always open to debate as to the security of its knowledge. Consequently, if one seeeks absolutes, one may be entering spirituality, because even though nature might be an absolute and structured machanism (or might not), individual humans cannot state that is is an absolute reality because we are limited to our reasoning process, which is always provisional as to truth - its just a process towards greater satisfaction. You are welcome... (read more)

Some ideas about Solomonoff that might be of use: he is trying to raise induction from given deductive bases into somehow being "forwardly deductive" rather than inductive. No doubt we can refine our bases for inductive hypotheses to make them as deductively strict as possible, but ultimately if they are too deductively strict we leave no room for induction and would merely be proposing a continuation of the status quo as a process leading inevitably, deductively, somewhere.

Induction is a process from supposed real facts to hypothesized real facts, and when the hypothesized real facts eventually arise, we deduce the accuracy of our hypothesis about them. We can hypothesize backwards about the bases... (read more)