All things Science related. λν = c

[RedskinRat]

Science, sort of

More like philosophy, but a great read:-

Skeptics, believers. Lay down your shotguns and knives. Take a moment to bandage and reload, and I will explain to you why an incorporeal garage dragon means that you should not be fighting. As much.

This strange beast, and its fantastical properties, are described in The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan.

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage,” he begins, “…Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself.”

You do, but you can’t. The dragon is invisible. You could spread flour on the floor to capture its footprints, but, alas, it also floats. You offer to fetch your infrared camera, but, sadly, its fire is heatless. Perhaps a can of spray paint, then, to make the dragon visible? Oh, right. Incorporeal.

You see where he’s going: “Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless,” he writes, “the only sensible approach is to tentatively reject the dragon hypothesis, [but] to be open to future data…”

The garage dragon is a straightforward parable about the scientific value of a non-falsifiable hypothesis, but it contains an important nuance. While rejecting the hypothesis, Sagan still leaves open the possibility that, after all, the dragon might still be real. “Immune to disproof,” after all, isn’t the same as “wrong.”

This may seem like splitting hairs until you consider that within the narrow philosophical gap between “immune to disproof” and “wrong” there lies the entire universe of mystical experience, the wellspring of religion and spirituality. The dragon we’re discussing here is not a cute, intellectual abstraction; it’s a powerful, visionary experience you had of the divine manifesting to you in the form of a winged serpent—and so what if it didn’t leave footprints? Yes, with all that supernatural stuffed into such a tiny crack, it seems that we ought to take a closer look at our epistemology.

In scientific positivism, objectivity is the measure of truth. The observation must be shared, the experiment replicated. To the extent that everyone can achieve the same result, witness the same phenomenon, the scales of evidence tilt that way; but if objectivity is the measure of truth, then, by extension, it is also what delineates the scope of inquiry.

Where materialists overreach is in equating the scope of scientific inquiry with the scope of reality; that is to say, they confuse the map for the territory. The objectively observable universe may well represent the whole extent of reality, but if it were not, then how would we know? For example, what are the laws which decide that a biochemical mechanism called the brain should be inhabited by an awareness capable of sensing the redness of red and the sourness of sour, but that an apple tree capable of blossoming in the spring and bending itself in the direction of the sun should not likewise experience the light and temperature that stimulate its own behavior? Or does it, perhaps? What of a thermostat, the operating system of a factory arm, or the neural network studying your browsing behavior? What is the deciding factor?

We lack an outside frame of reference that permits us to answer questions like these. We are able to gather sensory information from the world, but we can’t “go meta” and find out whether your chocolate tastes like my vanilla. We are constrained in what we can know, given the sort of beings that we are. How constrained, you ask? Well, that’s one of the things that we are constrained from knowing. The material model might not be far off, but it’s also possible that the qualitative universe—the “inner-space,” if you will—is actually a lot bigger, and a lot stranger, than we could ever imagine. You can’t hear it, but the lawn you just mowed—is screaming!

Continued at this link