What is the ontological status of a scientific law? I’m looking for answers people, get to it.
Some questions to consider:
Scientific laws are representations of the consistent ‘rules’ of how things interact with each other.
If they are just in the mind, science should still proceed in the exact same manner. It’s been working so far. Theoretical scientists may have to get a bit more philosophical, but that’s it.
That quote about reality and language isn’t quite true. Nor do I see how it could be. Are you talking about cognitive theoretic model of the universe?
I agree with Anthem, although I’m not scientist enough to understand what he quoted.
If there is an ‘out there’ independent of mind, it is unknowable. But on the other hand “just in our minds” doesn’t seem right either. How is it that we mostly agree on what we deem to be ‘objective reality’? The basic subjective/objective split has clear limitations as a useful paradigm.
Its not unknowable but it may be ‘unexperinceable’ in a direct with the senses type way. Our brains simulate reality in a certain way which was beneficial to us in our past, we don’t see crystals as mainly empty spaces for example, we’re middle sized organisms, so we’re going to view reality as middle sized organisms with adaptations for surviving an ancestral past.
That being said, when you tap on wood, the wood exists in more then your freaking mind. In reality, there is a ‘organism’ there, made up of certain cells, indepdent of how you experience it that tree exists as an independent organism. If your mind and all minds ceased to exist, the tree would still be there.
How does this tree look to a nonobserver? how does this tree exist in independent reality outside of my experience of it? Well, we can INVESTIGATE that with science, just like with the crystals being mainly made up of empty space. WE can’t see, feel, or sense that, but with certain tools we can come to that conclusion based on a lot of evidence.
environments are noable to a certain extent because we’re programmed by THOSE environments. For example, we see, because regularities of the environment have been programmed into our minds. Our minds don’t come out of thin air. We know that environments have regularities enough for organisms to evolve adaptations to them for example, independent of our brains we can know this.
I’m not even sure if its anything but an emotional question to ask either. “What does a tree appear like without an observer organism looking at it and hence its minds simulating it”?
It certainly doesn’t mean we can’t be sure that the tree is really there.
But that’s just it. If there is an ‘out there’ independent of mind, it is unknowable. What can be known is fundamentally defined by mind. Without mind there is no knowing. We perceive a tree and others perceive the supposedly same tree. Or we acknowledge that our perceptions are different but assume an underlying entity of some sort which we call a ‘tree’. The assumption is just that - an assumption. That assumption yields various thoughts, emotions, and actions and the world goes 'round and 'round. But where does the tree truly (rather than empirically) begin and end? Where does mind begin and end? Does mind pervade objects? Does it grasp them? Does it reach out to meet them? Is there something really out there, separate from me? I don’t know. I have to admit it seems like there is to me in my day-to-day existence.
Fortunately, we don’t have to know what we are seeing to go about our lives. We don’t have to know where a tree begins and ends - we are doing the defining, and those definitions suit our purposes - that’s just what definitions do. They suit our purposes. We analyse the world we observe - set the limits between objects and events. The difference between One Big Entity and all the various phenomena we observe is us.
The only time “not really knowing” is a problem is when we decide, any of us, that it is a problem.
That’s not really an answer.
But I have never heard an answer to those questions.
Science is doing just fine.
Yes, I think these questions are more immediately relevant in relation to human psychology - the main point being that science has nothing to fear from the shift in outlook.
No its not, and i’ll bring you back to the crystal example, crystals are mainly made up of empty space, none of our ‘senses’ could ever predict or sense that, we still know it due to science though.
Its not unknowable, its not directly experienceable, theres a huge difference. We can still get massive amounts of evidence for things we can’t directly sense (like see) through science and scientific tools. We’d never know about bacteria and disease otherwise. Theres also many aspects of ‘knowable’ as well because like I said, or explained earlier, our brbains solve massive impossible computational tasks by assuming regularities in the environment, those regularities actually came from the environment. We can say an environment exists and a lot about that environment based on the fact that its regularities (giant aspects of them) are programmed into us so we can merely precieve them.
Again its not an assumption at all. If only because brains don’t pop up out of nowhere, they require evolution and many species that go before hand, which all lived in an environment, and if animals which pre-date huumans have adaptations to trees, we know that trees exist independently of human minds, because we can’t have humans minds there at ALL PERIOD, without them. Needless to say, you have to account for the EXPERIENCE without saying all reality is subject to issues about that experience.
When we find a 8000 year old tree, we can say it predates all current human minds.
This is beyond absurd, it really really is, it just ignores every problem which could be raised with the idea (mountains of rational/consistantly logical arguements) to just assume that its indeed the case.
If you understood the limitations on computational systems and the problems they encounter, you’d know that suggesting that is Insane and nonsensical, to explain somthing like the human mind outside of programmed regularities to a *real ancesteral environment, is to make a probability calculation so vast that I don’t think you could calculate the numbers. As in, against the concept of you being right, maybe its called combinatorial explosio or somthing like that.
Postulate creating an aritificial mind as intelligent as your own. You could never create it to do anyything, without massive programming about its environment.
A robot AI might think this too, due to limitations in its awareness, that the only thing it can be sure of existing is its own mind and everything else can’t be truly ‘known’ but it and you, would be wrong. because the robot and us could never respond coherently to anything without such an environment, and its regularities.
Understanding the mind, before reducing all reality to it, might help you a little there.
What is it that infers through logic and empiricism? The mind of course. There is no knowledge without minds. It’s very basic.
There’s miscommunication happening somehow here - not sure what’s “beyond absurd” about what I’m saying. Whatever it is you think I’m saying, I’m probably not.
sigh
We know the environment exists outside of our minds because the only reason we have minds, at all, is because of programmed regularities to that environment? Whats so hard to understand, you don’t get brains outside of environments, its a neccesarry requirement for minds, there-for we can talk about things outside of our subjective experience, things we can’t experience ourselves, because they are a neccessary requirement for subjective experience.
The issue of combinatorial explosion that I talked about is real which is why an organism needs to have programmed mechanisms to the regularities of the environment. Once again, we can talk about environments exist5ing independently of human experiencec and know they exist, because its a logical neccessity, because to postulate otherwise is to postulate against combinatorial explosion and you can’t, because the numbers become, far far far far too vast. Like 1 in 1000 ← with so many other zeroes behind it you can’t count.
We know that much about environments independent of human minds.
If you were to program an intelligent robot you couldn’t escape this issue. The robots mind could not possibly exist indepenent from its environment because the definition of mind, requires programmed regularities to THAT ENVIRONMENT.
This is a self-contradictory statement. If we exist at all because of an environment which gives rise to mind, then mind is not seperate from it’s environment. Thus there isn’t an environment “outside of our minds”.
This huge issue of statistical probability doesn’t dissapear because of a run-of-the-mill philosophy arguement about reality and human minds. You still need to explain how humans act competently in regards to combinatorial explosion and the only explanation is content-dependent innate mechanisms, which is; programmed regularities from the environment.
What are you talking about? Statistical probability? You’re not understanding what I’m saying.
Mind and environment aren’t two seperate things.
Its not a self-contradictory statement at all and what you just said makes no sense. Let me give you a list of steps.
Do you understand yet? Even if the robot gained a subjective experience of walking it’d need to explain how it could experience anything period, and that requires a nonsubjective environment.
We could never tell the difference between two different shades of light, unless we were programmed massively to ther egularities of an environment where light distribution changes.
Do you get that?
Its a computational LIMIT
Take a deep breath Cyrene. It really doesn’t matter, and I’m tired today. And once you start quoting from The Adapted Mind, my own mind kind of shuts down in protest.