Posted by rramadass 1 day ago
Just because at a quantum scale everything becomes potential doesn’t mean all potential has been manifested.
It baffles me that so many serious scientists don’t understand this basic tenet.
It cannot be usefully analogized to things you can experience (or even to other things you might already understand).
It's useful, not metaphysically real. (Hot take btw) This is called Instrumentalism. The belief that it's real is called Scientific Realism. However over and over again, science can't cover edge cases, and we find better fitting models. The Copernician revolution is a good example of this dichotomy.
2. Academia basically forces you to believe the doctrine or you fail the class. From philosophy to physics to sociology. If you read the philosopher survey, you will find trendy things being quite high. It's a religion in itself.
Bonus 3: Philosophical Pragmatism and Instrumentalism generally solves this, but is intellectually a dead end. There is a reason analytic philosophy continues despite gaping holes in linguistics (late Wittgenstein) that ruin it. But at the same time, best fits might be missing a new paradigm. I wish I could tell people to ask AI to explain Hegel to understand, but I think people need to read it themselves.
Tl;dr: quantum mechanics is the best we have. It's definitely wrong, but it's the most useful we have.
Yes, but if you can make a reliable experiment that disagree with the doctrine, it will change, even if everyone hates the idea. In particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment
[0] I personally don't think Science concerns itself whether things are real, only whether the result of model and realness match, but that's what we are discussing here.
If you read late Wittgenstein or Karl Popper, you will find that science is a useful simplification. Rorty is boring and not useful, but he kills any sort of Realism.
The 3 gigantic holes:
1. It's all language. (Wittgenstein)
2. The edges of systems do not connect with each other.
3. There are exceptions to everything.
I know that might seem a bit generic, but these are the major flaws in the philosophy of science.
I was a true believer too.
If you ever want to learn a ton about science, read Popper. He tortures himself, but he's also scientific meta.
I guess if/when we discover a theory of everything then we could claim "this is real/reality", but what would that even mean other than modelling reality/outcomes with 100% fidelity?
Uh oh, some people have no sense of humor =\