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.
Comments
"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.