Scientific Laws

I could give you an even more straight forward and sensical reply.

The reasons we don’t have humans running into the arms of lions, tigers and bears is that former humans faced an environment of lions, bears, and tigers which ate them. They exist independently of our cognition of them, because we’re afraid of them, we wouldn’t be unless we were programmed to the regularity of dozens of people in ancesteral times being eaten by animals.

Your mind should have shut down when i originally mentioned combinatorial explosion until you could fit a reply in the run of the mill philosophy to ‘explain’ it away. An impossible computational problem is exactly that, and it doesn’t dissapear with some idea that everything is reducable to cognition.

Actually my mind did start shutting down when I read ‘combinatorial explosion’.

Try going back to my first post here and see if you can find me making an argument for solipsism anywhere. I’m talking about one thing only, which is that knowledge by definition requires a knower and a known. If you infer something, you have knowledge of your inference. That has nothing at all to do with saying that objective reality exists or not.

No, and I never said you did, I am talking about subjective/objective limits here and you’ve made commentary on that, i just felt i’d be specific in cutting those two clearly.

and like I said i disagree that things are ‘unknowable’ which I diffrentiate from ‘unexperiencable’ for example we know taht without human minds theres an environment of different light waves, we wouldn’t be able to experience that without a mind to think it, but as a source of knowledge we know that be true with or without humans. There’d be no one to experience that knowledge, but we can know things outside of human minds.

Ok.

I think that scientific theories are only our descriptions of reality and only apply within cetain limits and to an approximation. In other words thier not fundemental. We already know this is true of all current physics theories(dis counting string theory etc. as their not testable). I think “scientific law” is a bit ill defined. I would say that scientific laws exist out there in the sense that the universe does seem to stick to some kind of pattern. But our scientific laws(eg newtons law) are clearly our description of reality and not the laws of the actual universe.

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.
[/quote]
Really don’t agree with this principle. I think that this principle should be turned on its head. Its not that reality is a form of language rather it is that we are only able to understand it as such. We have to understand the universe by language(atleast in science) hence our description of reality ends up being structured as a language.

f=ma isn’t a law its a theory or more correctly a description that only works within certain limitaions. Its also a language “force equals mass times acceleration”. But i think the laws of the universe if you want to call them that is just natures way. Science should proceed as it is. The scienfic method works. But we must always know that we are free to come up with new theories and insights into natures way.

My current musings are rrelated to what if anything lies outside of the scope of science. That is what aspects of nature can be experienced but not testable by science. I think these aspects are in some sence indescribable. I think that they can be experienced but to do so we have to turn off the rational mind. That is not to say that we make irrational choices or come to irrational conclusions. Instead we come to no conclusions, consciously atleast, but through this experience we do gain something of worth. Put simply sciences rule should be to allow us to describe reality as best as possible whereas religions rule should be to allow us to experience reality as best as possible.(went off topic but fuck it)

My 2 cents:

  1. Both.
  2. The ojective laws that control the universe aren’t “a science” in my opinion, they just “are”. But I think they can be described as “laws”.
  3. I don’t know F=ma, but subjective laws definiely exist iin our minds. They probably aren’t 100% accurate to the objective universe, but they at the minimum exist.
  4. I’m saying “laws” exist both sujectively and objectively. Science should just keep going as it is going.
  5. I would describe all objective laws as “basic”. They are all neutral. It’s just our subjective categorizations that make them of lesser or greater degree of… “whatever”.

We can be at least certain that they exist in our minds. Now the mdq is whether they really reflect an intrinsic character of the universe. I’m inclined to think so considering how succesful they are but this opens up Hume’s old box of snakes.

We obseve what we think are regularities in our experience and we do our best to come up with utilitarian laws, theories to model it. In essence we end up imposing it on reality. I think to say that the universe obeys newton’s laws is to have it backwards. Its a subtle difference.

Just as it is.

I think this is the case.