"Open-mindedness" part 2

Man this is getting old.

But to stay vaguely on topic, let me attack it this way:  when it comes to the natural sciences there is no such thing as "proof", there is only evidence.  Anybody who talks about scientific proof is being an ignorant fool.  Maybe not a large ignorant fool, but an ignorant fool nonetheless.

jrootham wrote:

Man this is getting old.

But to stay vaguely on topic, let me attack it this way:  when it comes to the natural sciences there is no such thing as "proof", there is only evidence.  Anybody who talks about scientific proof is being an ignorant fool.  Maybe not a large ignorant fool, but an ignorant fool nonetheless.

Wow. Methinks, as the old guy said, he doth protest too much. Truth is a bitch sometimes, eh jroot? Brings out the worst in those trying to circumvent it and being seen through for the charlatans - or supporters of same - they actually are. If you really believe the 'preponderance of evidence' supports the official (911) conspiracy theory, then you ought to be using terms like 'ignorant fool' when gazing in your mirror, not throwing them around in juvenile ad hominem attacks when your Defence of the Dogma is found wanting. Which, I am afraid, it always will be, as you are attempting to defend a great fraud, and the truth will out, in the end, quite inevitably, quite beyond your refusal to deal with it.

OK, my post was overloaded with snark.  However, the substance remains.

Natural science works like this:  Somebody comes up with a theory about how things work.  They publish a description.  They and others figure out what to look for to prove it wrong.  They look.  After enough looking the relevant community of scholars come to a consensus that the theory is supported by evidence.  

That is the definition of science.

No such thing as proof in there.

The mathematical sciences work differently.  There, there are axioms, which are simply assumed to be true.  The ideas is to keep these small and simple.  Given the axioms people prove theorems, using standard mathematical logic.  In these field people look for mistakes in long and complex proofs.  However, they are looking for proofs, not evidence.

The 9/11 issue is a matter of engineering, not science.  

Point.  But the ribbon is key to the difference between the natural sciences and the mathematical sciences.

BTW My description of the natural sciences is from Popper via Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", the math part is from courses at U of T.

If anybody has an alternative idea as to how science works please provide it, and sources would be good too.

@ jrootham

I think we have already had the "is reality real" argument, and gone over the possibility that one might jump off a roof and possibly not fall to the ground. I'm sorry, but you are begging the question. 

The fact is that if I raise olive oil past about 200 degrees in the presence of air it WILL smoke.

If I remove vitamin C from your diet you WILL die within about nine months, very unpleasantly.

If I take sodium bicarbonate and acetic acid and know the number of moles I have of each  I can calculate exactly how much of either the acid or the base will have left over after they react.

If I know the weight of a ball, the angle and force with which I project it, I can tell pretty accurately where it will land (discounting wind and slight variations in gravity if I happen to be on top of a mountain).

So again, sorry, but that line of anti-reasoning only goes so far.

And please, if you want to mention that other subject, make another thread for it before this one gets swamped.

I didn't know that UofT profs support the crazy George II arsehole end of the 9/11 story. Can someone post a link?

jrootham wrote:

The 9/11 issue is a matter of engineering, not science.

 So if we follow jrootham's axiom, the Nazis should have discovered that the Gleiwitz incident was actually a series of false flag attacks on themselves and German infrastructure along the Polish-German border leading to the invasion of Poland. And they should have discovered the truth well before deciding to wage a "humanitarian war" on Poles for the sake of peace and security or however der fuhrer described the criminal attacks.

But can we really assume that jrootham's hindsight is 20-20? Because we now know from international legal types at Nuremberg that the Nazis' findings were completely wrong, and that it was the SS who perpetrated operation Himmler in order to make it appear as though foreigners were threatening German national security in 1939. The NAzis were completely fooled by the Nazis! And so would the rest of the world have been fooled until a World Court of law performed an independent review of the events.

HOW LUCKY it was for the Nazis that they had independent advisors on the matter after the terrible world war was over! False premise for and attack and invasion of a sovereign country. OOPS?

In fact as it turned out, there is now a very strong indication that everyone involved could have been saved a lot of trouble and bother with a legitimate investigation!! It's called forensic investigation today. And yes, it's considered a scientific area of study today fyi.

jrootham wrote:

I don't understand why you think I am making any claims in contradiction to the things you describe.

The question in science (as opposed to engineering) is WHY olive oil smokes above 200 degrees.  That it does is not in question.

Is that clearer?

 

No, it's not any clearer, as in I don't believe you have made your point.

I'm not a chemist, but I expect someone more familiar with the science would tell you it had to do with how reactive the compounds in the oil were - as in, the strength of the bonds holding those oils together as opposed to the strength of the force driving it to react with the oxygen in the air.

(edit)

Here, I don't understand all of this, but here is some of their guesswork:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature

Those are observed facts.  They are true observed facts.   What I am objecting to is the use of the term "proof" referring to natural science.

If the moon was made of green cheese physics, chemistry, and biology would all be different, but mathematics would be unchanged.  That is why the term "proof" is appropriate to mathematics but not the natural sciences.

If someone doesn't understand the technical and semantic difference between a mathematical proof and established laws, then that person isn't much of a scientist.

THe way "proof" is commonly used has very little to with the technical meaning.  People have debates about stuff all the time, for example electoral results or sports statistics.  When people are asked to prove their claims, usually a reference in a newspaper or on a web site will suffice.  This occurs despite everyone understanding that not everything in a newspaper or on the internet is true.

"Scientific proof" can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.  If you want make claims about the scientific method, and be taken seriously by scientists, best not to use amorphous concepts like scientific proof.

I think your wiki links are great, and I think they make clear that proof applies to math and logic, and that evidence applies to science.

I catch the #17 bus to work.  I know where the bus stops are.  I know that if I go to the bus stop and wait a while the #17 bus will come (eventually, sometimes it takes longer than I'd expect).  If someone asked me to "prove" that the #17 will come to the bus stop, I would point to the sign that lists the bus routes and emphasize that "#17" is listed.  If that wasn't enough "proof" (really the word here we should be using is evidence) then I would ask the person to engage in an experiment with me and wait 20 minutes to see if the #17 bus arrives.

I know that cities change bus routes all the time.  Sometimes this is due to better routes being established, and sometimes this is due to contruction, or special events.  I know that I don't have any actual guarantee that if I go to the stop the bus will show up, even if it is during the route's scheduled hours.

And yet, when I leave to go to work, I don't suffer from philosophical paralysis due to not being able to make absolutist claims about the bus.  I just go to the stop and wait for the bus.  When it arrives, I get on.  I have never met jrootham, but I suspect that he too is able to effectively take buses despite feeling that "proof" is not the criterion of value for the natural sciences.

If someone asked me to "scientifically" "prove" that Oak St. "is" the #17 bus route, I would assume that they have a poor understanding of the words they were using, regardless of my ability to show them a map of the route.

Is that clearer?

Science is about predictions and explanations.  It is not about proof.

Science is quite good at making predictions, as you have pointed out in post #68.

I have no idea what games you think I am playing.

I am not saying we do not know things.  I am making a linguistic argument against using the word proof, and suggesting that people who use the word in this context are either being lazy or ignorant.

I said it ages ago.  I don't think you are lazy and ignorant.  I think you are playing games.

Your oven might be faulty, your manure might have lots of straw in it and be insulating, Your timer might be faulty, and your technician might cheat cos he doesn't like you or because he likes flies.

Why do you think people die from tinned food? It is supposed to be cooked hot enough to destroy botulism bacteria but things go wrong.

The ball might crack the basin if it is too big or heavy or the basin too weak. 

You did not specify the size of the ball.  It might not even fit, or it might be too tiny to measure the  assumed rise in level.

Anyway, I have things to do.  And I do not like the game.

Edited to add.

Ok, you did not specify the metal either.  Please try it with sodium, or potasium or lithium.  Wear gloves.

Brian White wrote:

Ok, you did not specify the metal either.  Please try it with sodium, or potasium or lithium.  Wear gloves.

haha

I take some pleasure in the fact that you fall back on the rules when they serve your purpose.

No point in me trying to play games; clearly you are way ahead of me.

And clearly, your workarounds notwithstanding, you're ignoring the points I was illustrating.

The issue is not how to sneak the fly eggs into the jar, it is that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation of a higher order organism, even if the first chapter of Genesis says otherwise.

And an object immersed in water will displace its volume, so long as some invisible martians don't also sneak into the water or the beaker is destroyed by a controlled demolition.

I don't even need for you to try and explain how there can be anything colder than absolute zero.

And Fidel, demons use that explosive all the time. They found it all over the place at that giant plastic Jesus statue that burned down. I thought you knew this stuff.

Quote:

"Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is a part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning. This was a possibility of which Descartes could not have thought, but it makes the sharp separation between the world and the impossible" - [url=http://www.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/he...

Dogmatic realism not a necessary condition for science.

Quote:

[url=http://books.google.ca/books?id=Mehu2cpozSUC&pg=PA106&lpg=PA106&dq=%22If..."If we go beyond biology[/url],  and include psychology in the discussion, then there can scarcely be any doubt but that the concepts of physics, chemistry, and evolution together will not be sufficient to describe the facts. On this point the existence of quantum theory has changed our attitude from what was believed in the nineteenth century. During the period some scientists were inclined to think that the psychological phenomena could ultimately be explained on the basis of physics and chemistry of the brain. From the quantum-theoretical point of view there is no reason for such an assumption"

I think we can have free will, and that the past, present and future all exist in the river of time and space. We are not unobserved observers looking on. We are part of the canvass.

Quote:

"Then there's the mystery of consciousness. Will we finally have a framework that allows us to translate the mechanical pieces and parts into private, subjective experience? As it stands now, we don't even know what such a framework could look like ("carry the two here and that equals the experience of tasting cinnamon").

That line of research will lead us to confront the question of whether we can reproduce consciousness by replicating the exact structure of the brain – say, with zeros and ones, or beer cans and tennis balls. If this theory of materialism turns out to be correct, then we will be well on our way to downloading our brains into computers, allowing us to live forever in The Matrix.

But if materialism is incorrect, that would be equally interesting: perhaps brains are more like radios that receive an as-yet-undiscovered force. The one thing we can be sure of is this: no matter how wacky the predictions we make today, they will look tame in the strange light of the future." - David Eagleman, neuroscientist and writer [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jan/02/25-predictions-25-years]20 predictions for the next 25 years[/url]