[ExI] Science or Scientism?

[Stuart LaForge]

John Clark wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 8:00 AM BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> *> there are many questions that do not have scientific answers because
>>  they were not legitimate scientific questions to begin with. Many of
>> these questions concern the things that are most important of all:
>> faith, hope, love, truth, beauty, and goodness ? these do not lie in the
>> territory of science.*
>
> Hope, love, beauty, and goodness are all important virtues in my opinion
> but I don't expect science to say anything about them. Science can inform
> me what the universe's opinion about various things are but these virtues
>  are not about the Universe's opinion they are about mine, and even the
> Universe doesn't know more about my opinion than I do. But truth is
> different, science can help us get more of that. As for faith, in my
> opinion faith is not a virtue at all, I think it's a vice.

You are right in that science cannot say anything about those virtues.
That is both a strength and a weakness of science. It is due to the
empirical nature of science. Science is the art of using experiments to
prune away falsehoods. What this leaves you with is a mixture of truths
and unfalsifiable hypotheses.

Now keep in mind that there are many reasons why a hypothesis could be
unfalsifiable.

For example, limited resources. I could hypothesize that crashing
red-giant stars together would make a blue giant star. Since we cannot yet
crash stars together on purpose, my hypothesis is unfalsifiable which does
not necessarily make it true or false.

Another reason hypotheses might be unfalsefiable is for legal or ethical
reasons. I could hypothesize that human centipedes would not live very
long unless the people involved happened to all be the same blood type and
HLA tissue type. Since creation of human centipedes is unethical and
illegal, the hypothesis could never be tested.

Less disgusting but equally unethical would be conducting experiments
regarding things like love and hope because these entail emotional
manipulation of other people.

A third reason a hypothesis could be untestable is that it is logically
impossible to falsify. For example, solipsism would fall into this
category as would many other religious claims.

All that being said regarding the limitations of science. Now lets turn
our attention away from science, the art of determining falsehood through
empiricism, and turn it to math, the art of generating truth. Math is all
about truth.

A mathematical theorem is true in every place and every time. If a
mathematical theorem fails to be predictive of your world, it is because
you have misapplied it to something that falls outside of the scope its
intended axioms. The theorem itself is inevitably true.

Math too has its limitations, however, and its limitations are interesting
in relation to those of science and can be contrasted with them to good
effect. One notable limitation to math is the notion of uncomputable
numbers and functions. Another is Goedel's Incompleteness, which states
that in any consistent system of axioms there are true statements that are
nevertheless impossible to prove within that system.

Now I state that it is self-evident that the intersection of the set of
unfalsifiable hypotheses and the set of unprovable truths is non-empty. I
leave the proof as an exercise to the reader. It might be possible that
some religion somewhere might be an element of that set. This is
especially possible if we live in a simulation.

> Tell that  to the religious nuts who burned Giordano Bruno alive or
> threatened to torture Galileo and imprisoned him for life or to the
> Taliban
> who kill doctors who try to vaccinate children. Or tell it to any
> evangelical Trump voter who thinks the universe started not 13.8 billion
> years ago but in 4004 BC .

But the very gravity of these things should inform you that regardless of
the truth of their dogma, all religions are very real entities. This goes
back to my argument that all Shannon information has an energy content. If
you don't believe me then do a BOTEC using Landauer's principle for how
much energy it would take to erase all the information in the world
pertaining to radical Islam for example.

You would find it to be quite substantial.

> I don't understand why so many people typically feel that in order to be
> a good person one must be a religious apologist.

I don't think it is about being a good person, so much as it is about
being politically correct to avoid offending people. I am reminded about
an apocryphal story that when Voltaire was on his deathbed, a priest urged
Voltaire to renounce Satan. To which Votaire supposedly replied, "I am
sorry, father, but now is not the time to make new enemies."

Stuart LaForge