That there may be limits is not as interesting as what the limits actually are, which itself, may be an unsolvable problem. So it is useful to assume that there aren't limits, and press on.
It's like someone telling you the Halting Theorem shows there are undecidable computations. This has never dissuaded a single engineer from working on better compiler optimizations, or even limited detection of halting behavior, it just shows the general problem is insoluble.
Perhaps we may never be able to discover exactly how our life came about, or how the universe came about, but there are lots of other related questions narrower in scope that are just as valuable to answer.
I'd say the philosophical justifications are frankly irrelevent. I know this rankles people, I've seen it rankle people debating Lawrence Krauss. They provide a good backwards justification for having logical confidence in our scientific endeavors, but really, science is about making predictions and if you come up with a theory that makes useful predictions, allows you to build things and conduct experiments with agree with the model, in other words, something that "works", the philosophical underpinnings are not going to cause anyone outside Philosophy departments to sweat.
Thus, more useful than "how did OUR life actually evolve" which may be beyond the limits of the historical data or our ability to analyze, other questions are "are other kinds of life possible", and "how can other kinds of life evolve". If there's a useful theory of how other kinds of life can come about, and if we can actually test it with experiments, and actually create this life, then I'd say the "science fiction" of believing that science can answer the really tough questions, and drove physicists to actually solve a sub-problem, was a worthy bit of cultural driving force.
In other words, give me my beliefs in space empires, and warp travel. It inspires me, and others, into science, and useful endeavors, even if the primary goal (FTL) is impossible.
Calling his statement "Faith in science" doesn't change the validity of the claim in any way. It is useful to assume there aren't limits, meaning that it can produce physically observable and usable predictions. I'd say that is a pretty decent reason to hold a belief.
There seems to be a negative connotation to the phrase "faith in science" because faith and science are pitted as opposites here. The only difference is I can see plenty of reasons to have faith in something that has repeatedly given useful feedback, so I'm not even sure the phrase deserves all of the negative connotation it receives.
I agree that science has been incredibly useful and reliable in predicting the physical world. That's the point. Consciousness is an unknown. We can't see it, touch it or measure it in any way. Does it have a mass or a shape or a size? Science hasn't done a very good job of explaining consciousness at all.
And so because we currently don't have any good definitions, data, or explanation, we should therefore assume it's not possible and stop scientific research into consciousness?
Sure it has. Science has done quite a bit at explaining consciousness. It still has a long way to go but we are much further along than we were pre-science.
We can't see it, touch it or measure it in any way.
Consciousness interacts with the world through its affect on material substances. And so there is a window by which we can study consciousness objectively.
If we don't know what the limits are, why not? In basic Algorithmic Information Theory, you can prove that there is an upper limit to compression of a bit of data, but you can also prove that it's impossible to know what that limit is.
That is, you can never know if you're "done". That's why we keep pressing on with lossless data compression. We can never be sure we're finished.
We don't know when we've "learnt everything" that's possible to know by science and since we don't know what the limits are, why stop asking why?
We could have stopped with Classical Physics, but we kept pressing on and got Quantum Mechanics and General Relatively. We could have stopped with the Bohr model of the atom, but we keep probing deeper into particle physics and now we have the standard model.
Until you know your quest is futile, why stop?
HackerNews is a community oriented around YCombinator startups. The probability that any one startup is successful is vanishingly small. The vast vast majority of new businesses fail. You have to have a little bit of hubris to assume that you're going to strike gold on your particular venture. No one can predict success.
This false belief that your particular crazy idea is destined to make you rich and famous produces useful behavior for society. Since we cannot predict from the top down which ideas in the frontiers of idea-space are going to evolve as a best fit for current demands, the best thing we can do is conduct lots and lots of trial experiments -- startups colonizing all peaks and valleys of the idea-space.
Most will fail to climb to any peaks, left stuck in valleys. A few will climb a mountain that rises taller than others.
But this only happens because people perceive there's mountains to climb, that climbing mountains have rewards, and that it is possible to climb them.
i always curious why we say that when there are right in front of our eyes evidence to the contrary - galaxies moving away with speeds higher than the light speed. FTL is impossible only in SR - ie. in the static continuous space-time - which is only approximation (and not really true) of the real space-time.
Space itself is expanding - so galaxies really far away are being pushed away FTL but they're not actually 'moving' FTL. They couldn't travel that fast towards us, or indeed towards anything.
are being pushed away FTL but they're not actually 'moving' FTL. They couldn't travel that fast towards us, or indeed towards anything.
it is kind like saying that because all stones fall down, one can't fly or jump. Like stone falling down, space expansion (cooling down) is an entropy increasing process. What we know is that any entropy increasing process can be reversed by applying energy (which gets obtained by even more increasing of entropy somewhere else).
Yes, if you permit (human controlled/manipulated) space warping. It is currently unknown if this can actually be engineered due to the requirements for exotic matter. Sure, a primordial wormhole could just "exist" and we could use it, but the more exciting question is whether or not we can warp space without astronomical, uneconomical, and unknown, exotic masses.
Comments
That there may be limits is not as interesting as what the limits actually are, which itself, may be an unsolvable problem. So it is useful to assume that there aren't limits, and press on.
It's like someone telling you the Halting Theorem shows there are undecidable computations. This has never dissuaded a single engineer from working on better compiler optimizations, or even limited detection of halting behavior, it just shows the general problem is insoluble.
Perhaps we may never be able to discover exactly how our life came about, or how the universe came about, but there are lots of other related questions narrower in scope that are just as valuable to answer.
I'd say the philosophical justifications are frankly irrelevent. I know this rankles people, I've seen it rankle people debating Lawrence Krauss. They provide a good backwards justification for having logical confidence in our scientific endeavors, but really, science is about making predictions and if you come up with a theory that makes useful predictions, allows you to build things and conduct experiments with agree with the model, in other words, something that "works", the philosophical underpinnings are not going to cause anyone outside Philosophy departments to sweat.
Thus, more useful than "how did OUR life actually evolve" which may be beyond the limits of the historical data or our ability to analyze, other questions are "are other kinds of life possible", and "how can other kinds of life evolve". If there's a useful theory of how other kinds of life can come about, and if we can actually test it with experiments, and actually create this life, then I'd say the "science fiction" of believing that science can answer the really tough questions, and drove physicists to actually solve a sub-problem, was a worthy bit of cultural driving force.
In other words, give me my beliefs in space empires, and warp travel. It inspires me, and others, into science, and useful endeavors, even if the primary goal (FTL) is impossible.
"So it is useful to assume that there aren't limits, and press on."
Faith in science.
Calling his statement "Faith in science" doesn't change the validity of the claim in any way. It is useful to assume there aren't limits, meaning that it can produce physically observable and usable predictions. I'd say that is a pretty decent reason to hold a belief.
There seems to be a negative connotation to the phrase "faith in science" because faith and science are pitted as opposites here. The only difference is I can see plenty of reasons to have faith in something that has repeatedly given useful feedback, so I'm not even sure the phrase deserves all of the negative connotation it receives.
I agree that science has been incredibly useful and reliable in predicting the physical world. That's the point. Consciousness is an unknown. We can't see it, touch it or measure it in any way. Does it have a mass or a shape or a size? Science hasn't done a very good job of explaining consciousness at all.
And so because we currently don't have any good definitions, data, or explanation, we should therefore assume it's not possible and stop scientific research into consciousness?
Sure it has. Science has done quite a bit at explaining consciousness. It still has a long way to go but we are much further along than we were pre-science.
Consciousness interacts with the world through its affect on material substances. And so there is a window by which we can study consciousness objectively.
If we don't know what the limits are, why not? In basic Algorithmic Information Theory, you can prove that there is an upper limit to compression of a bit of data, but you can also prove that it's impossible to know what that limit is.
That is, you can never know if you're "done". That's why we keep pressing on with lossless data compression. We can never be sure we're finished.
We don't know when we've "learnt everything" that's possible to know by science and since we don't know what the limits are, why stop asking why?
We could have stopped with Classical Physics, but we kept pressing on and got Quantum Mechanics and General Relatively. We could have stopped with the Bohr model of the atom, but we keep probing deeper into particle physics and now we have the standard model.
Until you know your quest is futile, why stop?
HackerNews is a community oriented around YCombinator startups. The probability that any one startup is successful is vanishingly small. The vast vast majority of new businesses fail. You have to have a little bit of hubris to assume that you're going to strike gold on your particular venture. No one can predict success.
This false belief that your particular crazy idea is destined to make you rich and famous produces useful behavior for society. Since we cannot predict from the top down which ideas in the frontiers of idea-space are going to evolve as a best fit for current demands, the best thing we can do is conduct lots and lots of trial experiments -- startups colonizing all peaks and valleys of the idea-space.
Most will fail to climb to any peaks, left stuck in valleys. A few will climb a mountain that rises taller than others.
But this only happens because people perceive there's mountains to climb, that climbing mountains have rewards, and that it is possible to climb them.
Let people have their dreams.
i always curious why we say that when there are right in front of our eyes evidence to the contrary - galaxies moving away with speeds higher than the light speed. FTL is impossible only in SR - ie. in the static continuous space-time - which is only approximation (and not really true) of the real space-time.
They aren't moving FTL locally.
Space itself is expanding - so galaxies really far away are being pushed away FTL but they're not actually 'moving' FTL. They couldn't travel that fast towards us, or indeed towards anything.
it is kind like saying that because all stones fall down, one can't fly or jump. Like stone falling down, space expansion (cooling down) is an entropy increasing process. What we know is that any entropy increasing process can be reversed by applying energy (which gets obtained by even more increasing of entropy somewhere else).
Yes, if you permit (human controlled/manipulated) space warping. It is currently unknown if this can actually be engineered due to the requirements for exotic matter. Sure, a primordial wormhole could just "exist" and we could use it, but the more exciting question is whether or not we can warp space without astronomical, uneconomical, and unknown, exotic masses.