Tautological Scientific Realism

[@KaneB]

Scientific realism: kzbin.info/www/bejne/l2G4qXmegLScfMk Challenges to inference to the best explanation: kzbin.info/www/bejne/d3K3d5eCg8ikqLs

[@bobcousins4810]

To be precise, I wouldn't say that science tells us "how the world works", but science tells us "how the world appears to us to work". In other words, science creates a model that closely matches how we perceive the universe. This allows us to create technology that works as expected. What the Universe "really is" may be unanswerable.

[@vilmospalik1480]

True, but I would like to add that maths doesn’t follow this in the same way as science does and allows us (as long as some pretty basic axioms hold) to actually beyond a shadow of a doubt prove statements

[@lowersaxon]

@@vilmospalik1480Prove math statements, yes. Its quite easy to pump up nonsense with overdimensioned math. Physics is full of that.

[@danlindy9670]

Agree, but why is any of this even up for debate when our own best and most fundamental scientific theory (quantum theory) tells us that the presumed existence of an objective observer is magical thinking? Even a pure mathematician will be unable to conceive of a hypothetical universe in which one part of it can have direct knowledge of another part. Ultimately, we are stuck with tools such as Markov blankets when considering such relations, so further philosophical hand-wringing seems (at least to me) like beating a dead horse with a dead cat.

[@smallpeople172]

Arguably you can’t say the universe works any other way than how we perceive it to.

[@coachhannah2403]

⁠@Crowned_Conquering_Man-Child- Incorrect, science is not a religion.

[@channelnamegoeshere7355]

A thought I had that's similar to the "concerns about conceivability" section: Yesterday I lost my car keys. I searched every corner of my bedroom for them, and cleared every spot so thoroughly that I concluded that they were not in my room. I figured the only way they could be in my room was if my eyes were not working properly (i.e. radical skepticism). I gave up, and went to get my spare keys from downstairs. As soon as I left my room, I realized that my keys were in my pocket. In this anecdote, I was mislead by expectations in such a way that my standards for falsification were not adequate. It may seem silly to propose that an entire civilization can not realize the "keys are in there pocket", but there are historical examples of entire countries being mislead due to social influences. Tautological scientific realism says that everything's been adequately falsified beyond a doubt, but falsification is not an exact science. I don't think it's a radically skeptical view to say "there may be a hole in how we falsify what we know".

[@nickhbt]

The story of the keys is the story of my life. I am there for a fallabalist.

[@thealmightyaku-4153]

This concern would only have merit if you considered scientists to be morons like everyone else. Do you have any education in experiment design? About any aspect of the processes scientists go through to consider every possible (or sometimes impossible) influences on their experiments? About how they control for possible influences? About the endless repetition of experiments, under differing conditions, and why that raises confidence in the results? Or even just peer review and replicability? Nah - they must just be missing something.

[@channelnamegoeshere7355]

@@thealmightyaku-4153 Yes, I do have education in all those areas. The amount that scientists are educated was addressed in my original comment. Entire civilizations, even the educated parts of them, have been mislead before. You were so distracted with trying to aggressively demean me that you missed the point of my comment: The process in which we empirically falsify things is based on a rationally derived and not-totally-formal process. Because of that, there is no certain way of knowing that our process is infallible. I find it really disappointing that a comment like yours is found under a good and open minded video like this. The vague personal attack that you leaned into is something I would expect under a CNN or FOX news video, not a video weighing the merits of scientific realism.

[@MorrisDugan]

@@thealmightyaku-4153 Apparently, your kind of "scientist" gets no training in humility, and should even be taught that humility is unnecessary for such a great being, after that wonderful, perfect training.

[@ltc0060]

@@thealmightyaku-4153 None of the scientist I've met consider themselves dumb. All but ignorant consider themselves infaliable. They do their best in their circumstances, also they recognize they can't possible take everything into account. You might think maybe the ones I met are "morons" like everyone else, and consistantly forget/disregard to check their pockets. Or maybe they understand humans are limited in their capacity. I prefer to think the latter.

[@GoomySmash]

I think another aspect that is limiting the progression of science is the framing of our assumptions and which assumptions go unquestioned or are simply assumed to not be debatable. For example, why do we say in chemistry class "the electrons don't ACTUALLY like the protons, they don't ACTUALLY have preferences, it's just an analogy" when such a claim is completely untestable and unverifiable either way? We have no way to understand whether anything is conscious or whether it has an experience. We don't know if certain animals are conscious or whether they experience things or if that experience is at all similar to humans, we don't know if insects are conscious, or plants, or bacteria or even electrons. Yet, it's still so inconceivable for people to say simply "we don't know if the electrons are conscious and do what they do because they have desires or whether they're governed by something else we don't understand at a fundamental level" Instead we assert very strongly "the electrons DEFINITELY are not conscious entities that have any amount of preference or agency" even though that is essentially a religious assertion based on belief rather than empirical evidence. That form of radical skepticism, questioning very fundamental foundational beliefs is how i think we progress in science, and the lack of questioning very basic assumptions is why we have seen little progress in fundamental understanding of physics despite knowing it's incorrect for nearly a century

[@denisl2760]

We have thought things were conscious for thousands of years. We thought trees and rocks and rivers had spirits. That thought process hasn't led to any advancements. Assuming things not to be true until proven otherwise is central to science. If you do a lab experiment and a solution in a beaker turns blue overnight, you kind of have to assume no one broke into the lab at night and added a drop of blue food coloring to your solution. Maybe we can't know with 100% certainty that it didn't happen, but we can be 99.9999999% sure that it probably didn't happen, and proceed with the assumption that it didn't happen.

[@GoomySmash]

@@denisl2760It seems quite dismissive to assert that there has been absolutely no scientific advancements from investigating the consciousness of traditionally "inanimate" entities. Recently, studying plants we've found they are capable of complex communication, and are even capable of detecting the buzzing of pollinators through "hearing" through their leaves and flower petals. They even exhibit traits of altruism and self sacrifice for the greater good, warning other trees of predators by releasing warning communication chemicals with no other known purpose. Additionally, the Gaia hypothesis is still something that was at first, considered complete quackery, but has been very influential in understanding feedback loops and the interconnected nature of different biospheres and its relation to climate change. I would not be so quick to dismiss things humans have believed for thousands of years. Meditation was considered a religious ceremony with no practical benefits by Western science for a long time, until we learned this thing people have done and believed for thousands of years actually has grounding in real benefits and physical reality.

[@michealcherrington6531]

Science says what stuff does, not what stuff is. i.e. dual-slit experiment results (quantum wave or particle) does not tell us what it is, just what it does. It does not tell us the "wave" literally becomes a "particle", it tells us what it does under experiment. Science does not provide an ultimate what or an ultimate why. Such conclusions are our responsibility.

[@СергейМакеев-ж2н]

It is totally conceivable that the interconnection of the "central lore" is not as complete as it appears: as in, there actually is a "seam" between one part of science which is radically false and completely wrong-headed, and another part which is approximately true. This seam might just not be easily noticeable. It might require an impossibly accurate "map of science" to see the discrepancies.

[@donaldstrubler3870]

This "mapping" is the process of science itself.

[@silverharloe]

3:21 ah, if you said "Homeric myths" instead of "Homeric gods" you could have asked, "what's the difference between electrons and Electra?" which would have earned quite a few points for style.

[@plasmaballin]

This arguments makes a lot of sense to me, since I've always thought that scientific anti-realists focus way too much on physics. The go-to example is Newtonian mechanics being overturned in favor of general relativity and quantum mechanics. This makes scientific anti-realism seem very plausible because we can always imagine that, whatever we think the fundamental constituents and laws of nature are, they can actually be reduced to something even more fundamental. But if we try to apply scientific anti-realism to any other domain, it suddenly looks a lot less plausible. If you try to tell me that our theories of biology are all wrong and that our bodies really work in a completely different way that just looks the same to all of our experiments, I don't know what to call you other than a radical skeptic. It may always be impossible to say with high confidence that our theories of fundamental physics are exactly true, that is, that they really have an ontology and metaphysics that matches objective reality, but this seems to be more of a case of not being able to know the exact nature of a thing-in-itself, rather than a problem for all of science.

[@dimitrispapadimitriou5622]

Scientific realists are not obliged to think that currently accepted scientific theories have to be exactly correct ( who defines what exactly means?) or that they have to be the final answers, or " fundamentally true". They only have to give a correct description of physical phenomena in their domain of applicability. Theories that describe chemical reactions are not fundamental in any sense , yet they have the ability to give an accurate picture of their domain. Some other theories are much wider in their domain of applicability, like General Relativity: Nobody in his right mind will doubt that the effects of gravity ( from Black Holes, gravitational lensing, the Cosmological expansion, gravitational waves to time dilation) are "really" associated with the dynamics of the theory, the spacetime curvature, nobody seriously doubts that gravity is described by spacetime geometry! This explanation is here to stay, even if a deeper theory that reconciles QM and GR appears in the future. The geometric description will be correct even then for most observational scales. The same with other approximate but accurate theoretical descriptions. Scientific realism is a much broader and nuanced concept than some philosophers want to believe...

[@asd-wd5bj]

I'd argue that at least the jump from Newtonian physics to relativity wasn't "radical" either. One thing that is often forgotten is that Newton never assumed that his idealized time and space hold, he was a mathematican at heart and understood that he can't do so without proof, so his actual statement, the "central lore" in this context, would've been "within the limits of human observations, time and space appear invariant", which after Einstein turned into "within the limits of human observations, time and space vary by generally unpercievable amounts" - which isn't that big of a change The idea that science was fully confident that time and space are absolute prior to the 20th century is mostly an artefact of our educational system, most physicists before Einstein were humble enough to know that they should keep the question open-ended until further proof, so i don't think it's right to call the idea as a whole "central lore"

[@coachhannah2403]

Except that biology is, ultimately, based on physics, and thus subject to your critique of physics...

[@plasmaballin]

@@coachhannah2403 Biology isn't based on physics, though. It's not even reducible to physics, since it also depends on physically contingent facts about how the world happens to be (the laws of physics don't tell you that house mice have to exist, it just happens to be the case that on our planet a species with those characteristics evolved). But more importantly, biological theories are agnostic about the fundamental nature of reality. It doesn't matter to biology whether particle interactions really follow the Standard Model because biological theories don't use the Standard Model of particle physics. I suppose that some theories of biology do include some physics, so parts of those theories could be vulnerable if physics anti-realists are right. But what about something like the theory of evolution? Even if it turned out that electrons don't exist at all or some similar anti-realist position was true (and that's a pretty strong anti-realist position), it wouldn't affect any of the claims of evolutionary theory.

[@coachhannah2403]

@@plasmaballin - Ah, not a biologist, I see. Take a biochemistry class some time. Hell, look only at photosynthesis, and you will realize you are incorrect.

[@jugbrewer]

There are a load of great ideas here, thanks! One question I have is why do we take it for granted that our scientific lore is remarkably successful? What are we comparing that success to? Science is remarkably good at answering questions which are closely related to the questions it has previously succeeded at asking. We aren't generating conjectures at random and using science to test them. We have really only scientifically investigated a tiny portion of reality, and had great success within that, but I don't often hear that qualification when we talk about science's success. Science to me is like a tree, with some branches continually growing from what was there before, splitting into more and more refined stems, and some branches being pruned back. The tip of each branch is part of a lineage of thought, and stem from past inquiries which were successful or useful or interesting to us; we don't really systematically test every idea. There are questions we haven't thought to ask because they aren't part of a lineage of thought. There are some questions that we stop asking for various reasons. Since these branches of inquiry don't lead into more branches or bear any fruit, we forget to account for them. When we admire our beautiful tree and remark at how successful it is at growing into the shape it has taken, we forget how many flowers went unpollinated and vanished, or how many shoots were killed by a hard frost 50 years ago and have since been subsumed into the trunk with little trace. I think we are biased toward success when assessing the tree. Some of the questions that thinkers were grappling with thousands of years ago have been basically solved by science - what causes infection, how to map the movement of the planets. These are remarkable successes. But some age-old questions - how to know who will win an election or battle, or predicting the weather, are still nowhere near being solved, and may prove to be computationally irreducible. In principle, a scientist should be able to generate next year's Pullitzer-prize winning novel with equations, since novels are as much a part of reality as viruses. But we don't ask them to, because historically that's not what we've wanted science to do, and because we know either way it wouldn't be possible. This empty space around the branches of science defines the shape of it as much as what is inside its bounds.

[@aniksamiurrahman6365]

Actually, statistics or its new version with shiney silicon wrapper - data science, can quite accurately predict next year's pulitzer prize winners as well. Finding new area of hypothesizing will only expand the same success of science.

[@anthonyspencer766]

Great video, Kane. I'm not going to say there is nothing to this. I found myself nodding in agreement. I guess I have three concerns. The first is that the logic of the argument seems to support more than scientific realism: there are plenty of unscientific beliefs we have about reality, which, if they were substanially mistaken would increase the likelihood of broad skepticism. So I wonder if this doesn't come down to a kind of clever way of reframing pragmatism. The second concern is that we are left with the sore task of deciding what gets included in the sciences. It's one thing to draw up a demarcating line around the vague lines of a high school physical sciences curriculum. But it seems like things would get more difficult for philosophers who attempt to really analyze what inclusion in this set means. For example, what does confirmation look like? And what degree of confirmation is good enough? Are we as confident about the Big Bang as we are about atomic theory? Or, how about the psychosocial sciences? There is a resemblance between methods generally considered scientific, but we also recognize it is varied enough to make science just about impossible to define in a seriously satisfying way. So I am inclined to say that if you can't give that kind of satisfying epistemic account, it isn't a strong case for scientific realism. Third, it seems like this argument would have worked for the human race at any historical state of its scientific knowledge. Who ever thinks they are so far from the truth that being radically wrong is expected? Hear me out. I'm thinking that if one rejects realism about the prevailing state of knowledge of the day, then one is just accepting the skeptical possibility. You'd have to tolerate the possibility, at any time, of being so wrong that brain-in-a-vat is on the table. If nobody has ever really thought that type of scenario is on the table, then they'e had the right reasons (in terms of conceivability) to believe the prevailing lore of the day. Forget the evidential standard: it is contingent. One always has the evidence good enough for convention at any given time.

[@jolssoni2499]

I think Hoefer's argument pairs nicely with Vickers' book "Identifying future-proof science": Looking at the track record, any finding that enjoyed a ~95% consensus in the wide scientific community was never overturned. Basic physics may get rewritten every 50 years or so and our monkey brains may never grasp the final ontology assuming there is one, but the table of elements, materials engineering, basic laws of thermodynamics etc is settled science.

[@sttthr]

Didn't Newtonian Mechanics enjoy a >95% consensus within the scientific community at some point?

[@jolssoni2499]

@@sttthr It's hard to measure consensus from a time when scientific literature wasn't established like it is now, but anyhow Newtonian mechanics still holds at sub-relativistic energy levels. Even though Le Verrier in the 1800s couldn't have had a clue about GR, he was still correct in saying that Earth revolves around the center of mass of the Earth-Sun system in a near ellipse, give or take slight perturbations.

[@KaneB]

@commutativedivisionring In the sense that's relevant to the realism debate, Newtonian mechanics turned out to be false with respect to its claims about the underlying structure and nature of the universe.

[@ostihpem]

​@commutativedivisionring Then take medieval theories. They were plain wrong by what we know now. Nothing prevents us being in the same position from a 1.000 years future position.

[@Gregoryzaniz]

@commutativedivisionringNot true

[@NikolajKuntner]

Very interesting, I haven't heard those arguments being packaged into a framework like that. Now as someone who both has a physics PhD and is also generally trying to tackle math constructively (indeed I combine the two even on my channel), 22:30 in (1) strikes me as just one big usage of double-negation elimination, just being put into nice prose. I'm going to make a longer mathematical tangent to drive my point home. [So I don't know how hands on you're into that corner of logic, but here's a example of the treatment. Say we have the two-element set X:={0,1} and some proposition P choose so as to be inaccessible to us, as far as our proof calculus is concerned (say P equals the Riemann hypothesis. Or say P equals the Riemann hypothesis in conjunction with the consistency claim of our theory. I.e. P is a conjunction of 1. a statement not yet proven or rejected and 2. a statement independent of the proof calculus for a consistent and sound theory, by Gödel 2). If our theory got a comprehension principle, we may form the subset Y:={x in X | (x=1) or P}. This Y is a subset of X and by definition contains the number 1. Moreover, X contains 0 if and only if P holds, and vice versa. Because P per design cannot be proven or rejected, the same holds for the claim that 0 is a member of X. Now for any subset S of the naturals, the mathematical induction principle can be shown to imply that S being empty is equivalent to S not having a least element. The contrapositive of this say that any non-empty set N cannot be ruled out to have a least element. In particular, since our X contains 1 and is thus non-empty, it cannot be ruled out to have a least element. A bit stronger yet, we have shown that it cannot be ruled out that either 0 or 1 is the least element of X. Now assuming the principle of excluded middle (PEM) here, one may show that "either 0 or 1 is the least element of X". However, constructively, we cannot make the claim that "either 0 or 1 is the least element of X". As noted, constructively, we can only show that "We cannot rule out that either 0 or 1 is the least element of X". Indeed even classically, by design we certainly cannot point to 0 and say it's the least element of X, and we can also not point at 1 and say it's the least element of 1. Due to this (due to us not being able to point to an individual), the intuitionist mathematician will argue (and I sort of agree) that there is little gained in assuming the PEM or the double-negation elimination principle (DNE). All that we really want to say, we can say constructively. And all we cannot say constructively, is because it would be elusive existence claims like the above. A more casual example is being in a care accident and waking up in a hospital without windows. Say we have no evidence for it being day outside right now, not do we have evidence for it being night outside right now. Granting that night and day are two dual parts, we derive that "finding evidence that it's neither day nor night outside", that would be inconsistent". As this is the statement we can constructively derive and as it captures our meaning, there is not much to gain from postulating PEM. What PEM would enable us here is to derive "it's either day outside or night outside", but yeah that's not really of value. We can classically make this claim without also providing evidence that it's day, or that it's night, and we already constructively derive the inconsistency of rejecting this disjunction. The issue with classical mechanics is that if you don't keep track of uses of PEM, then just citing a theorem of classical mathematics does not tell the one you recite it to whether the mathematical object can be exhibited. If the object can be exhibited indeed, then you can produce the strong theorem also constructively anyway. On the other hand, the Gödel-Gentzen translation of the theorem (basically the double-negation of it) can always be proven also constructively.] So anyway, sorry for the long side comment and back to topic. Let's say we grant (2) in 22:12 in its "cannot conceive" phrasing, for all of realism, i.e. that "there is no alternative" and so we reject the idea of non-realism. I'm not finding myself compelled to go further than that - it seems that "our meaning" is captured, similar to my mathematical example above. Having ruled out the non-existence of a thing, but also not being able to witness/demonstrate/provably witness the thing, why apply DNE and make the claim it exists? I feel like adopting a double-negated form of Tautological Scientific seems compelling. Conceiving an alternative is hard, and we adopt the view that this means we won't adopt an alternative to realism. The axiomatic jump from "cannot conceive alternative" to "won't permit any alternative" is already strong and captures our meaning - end of story, we don't have to also accept realism on the nose, as this framing would always prompt us to back it up with evidence against conclusive evidence for the reality of things (some existence claims) that we cannot actually provide. Now we can take (1) and debate the notion of "strong evidence" as opposed to mathematical "conclusive evidence." Again, I'd say given the practical nature of physical theories - its means and use to make predictions - we don't need to treat the former as if it's the latter. Strong evidence compels us to use the theory and that's what we want to get out of it. Not having to doubt virus theory is false is what captures our meaning. Virus theory has practical applications. No real gain in now adopting DNP and making the claim that virus theory holds true and they exist. Keep it up.

[@squfucs]

>says he has a phd >click read more yep, thats a postdoc comment alright

[@TotalNigelFargothDeath]

Hmm yes, I see, quite fascinating if i do say so myself... So i shouldn't mix margarine with ketchup

[@NikolajKuntner]

@@TotalNigelFargothDeath Logic dictates to avoid margarine, period.

[@krzysztofciuba271]

"the notion of "strong evidence" as opposed to mathematical "conclusive evidence.""??? You still don't know Math is a..fiction: two apples and two dogs are not two "apple-dogs". Take a basic textbook of logic@methodology and don't fool yourself like the majority of scientists who don't have a clue about the methodology of their own subject matter. Your "evidence" is just a recorded something in a laboratory: e.g., the position of something in a Wilson Chamber or the click in a Geiger counter; then, you need a (divine) logic (or H.Spirit) to...infer (reductively) what you saw. A.Tarski's Intro to Logic, AD 1935 will help you@don't use psychological/qualitative terms ("strong",..) in any precise axiomatic system of knowledge

[@xxxYYZxxx]

Theorizing outside of a universal reality theory is just politics. For example, unless or until physical theories refer to a model which describes the infinitesimal elements of calculus upon which physical theories rely, you can't claim to be making statements about the nature of reality via physical theories. The model exists, so there's really no excuses at this point.

[@DavoidJohnson]

When you introduce the phrase " therefore we are forced to believe that " you are not talking about science at all. Science makes no claims about truth but builds workable models and judges them against results.

[@mundoheavy666]

I never heard of Tautological Scientific Realism before, but based on your explanation I feel like a better name would be: "Lack of imagination" realism or "Lack of intelectual humility" realism.

[@Eta_Carinae__]

I think this is a subtly much more interesting position than it appears on its face. What it seems to imply is a kind of empirical completeness criterion, where theories can have sufficient empirical justification to cross a threshold, by which the graph of all hypotheses and their logical connection to other hypotheses is disrupted when the tautologically real hypothesis is also disrupted. I bet this selfsame criterion is also implied by confirmation holism.

[@TheAmazingMooCow2]

I dislike Hoefer's argument at 30:30 ish because the dual analogy works just as well; there are plenty of conjectures that were widely believed to be correct and then proven incorrect. I'm sure Hilbert and his followers deemed the inability to get a complete formal system for the foundation of mathematics to be inconceivable, until Gödel came along.

[@GeorgWilde]

11:10 "There is no middle path between realism and radical skepticism." (aka there is no anti-realism) - Said the law of excluded middle (A or non A) The law of excluded doesn't hold in anti-realism.

[@theronwolf3296]

I tend to think of scientific explanations as surrogates for reality, rather then reality itself (which we probably never actually know). But it works pragmatically. Similarly, an animal may, through experience, sense changes in wind, temperature or humidity to sense that a storm is coming. That is the animal's 'explanation' for the behavior of the storm. And it does the job. Scientific theories are likely similar, except on a more intellectual level. But even the structure of 'intellect' is tied into our evolutionarily derived minds... so this the best we can do to synthesize reality. Good enough for most purposes.

[@veganphilosopher1975]

You ever feel like you dont even need to study a philosophical topic cause Kane will do it for you?

[@DoubtX]

The thing that makes me reject scientific realism isn't even that it's canon is incorrect, but that it misses the point. The selection process of the canon of scientific realism is never accounted for, but merely assumed to be a reasonable selection, and sometimes it's even assumed to be an unmotivated selection. That's to say, that it thinks its truth claims aren't made in service of any goal. The real reason why physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. are selected, is because it conforms to an aesthetic that scientific realists believe is good. It's an aesthetic that assumes that human's have the ability to collectively progress, and proponents of this aesthetic subsume their identity into this idea of a human collective. I'm skeptical of scientific realism because it contains a lot of extra baggage that doesn't directly help me to fulfill my basic necessities as a human individual. My goal is the cultivation of personal wisdom. I don't desire to identify with a human collective, because my sense organs end at the limits of my skin. While there is some limited ability to relate to others, the richest experiences cannot be had vicariously. The only reality there is must be found by engaging in personal undertakings.

[@millerstation92]

I see this a lot from philosophers who try to use the motive or the why scientists got into science as a gotcha of why scientific realism is not true. However, we all have the same needs. Go a day without food and water and tell me how your motives are personal wisdom or some bullshit. SCIENTIFIC REALISM IS UNSTOPABLE. You will never be more than a soup of atoms no matter how hard you try. As Feynman said, even the deepest philosopher has to despite debating is what he sees in his plate is a steak or just light, has to eat or he will die of starvation.

[@coachhannah2403]

In physics, it is assumed that all models are false, but USEFUL. A model is accepted only to the extent it can make predictions and can answer questions. Newtonian models are STILL useful for this reason, though relativity is required to have GPS, and modern radio antennae are based on quantum effects. I do believe some recent space probes trajectories contain relativistic calculations...

[@HowMarvel]

This kinda sounds like a philosophical prove by contradiction in a sense. Great video, thanks

[@philipoakley5498]

There's still a competition with those who have a Theological Realism approach... Plate tectonics is pretty new science. The presentation tries to cut fog and label the two parts as being distinct. Clouds part quite slowly with the weather/ sometimes there is a clear transition but often the shift is the result of a steady persistence and ability to see the new ideas (see Orwell's 1984 and his vocabulary C: It (that vocabulary) is what science develops!

[@hernanmurua8088]

It is a complex problem in the sense it is emergent so not reduced to the best, the smallest, the coherence. All is just a part , and hipereal (in Edgard.Morin's sense) can only be understood in a whole.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

Doesn't the fundamental physics exception undermine the whole idea, though? All sciences, in theory, should be reducible to physics, so if fundamental physics changes, the underlying onthology of all sciences changes. If, say, string theory turned out to be correct (it isn't), those viruses would have turned out to have many more spatial dimensions than we used to think...

[@KaneB]

There are some philosophers who endorse both realism and anti-reductionism, for instance John Dupre (see his book “The Disorder of Things”). I'm not sure what Hoefer's position is on this, but perhaps that's one line he could take. With respect to the point about viruses though, he might say something like this: regardless of whether string theory is true, so regardless of whether viruses have many more spatial dimensions than we ordinarily assume, the central lore of viruses will still be in place, namely that viruses are stands of DNA encased in a protein coat that replicate by hijacking living cells etc. As far as I understand, string theory doesn't threaten that.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

@@KaneB Well, here we run into the question of incommensurability. One way of looking at it would be to say that the "lore" on viruses only superficially stays the same, while in fact every word in that description acquires a fundamentally different meaning.

[@plasmaballin]

If string theory turns out to be correct, would that imply that viruses don't exist? No, nor would it imply that anything biologists say about them is false. All it would imply is that the fundamental constituents, which played no role in the theory of viruses anyway, are different from what we thought before, without threatening viral theory itself. There was a part in the video where Kane mentioned that we don't need to know the origins of viruses to believe that viral theory is correct. It's a similar thing with string theory. We could discover that the origins of viruses are very different from what we previously thought, just as we could discover that their fundamental constituents were different, but that wouldn't really change what we think about viruses. I don't think the issue of reductionism really affects this. Even for something like the periodic table, which should definitely be in principle reducible to physics, discovering that string theory is true wouldn't render it false. The only theories of physics that could possibly be true, barring radical skepticism, are those that produce the same experimental results that we've already seen, including the existence and behavior of elements that fit into the periodic table. There are multiple fundamental theories that would all lead to the periodic table, since the same higher-order theory could be reduced in multiple ways.

[@garygallagher7341]

The 'many varieties of evidence' that put the central lore beyond doubt resonate with Hasok Chang's Operational Coherence. But I don't think Chang would endorse the 'realism' of the lore.

[@fontenbleau]

the great irony is that this topic video are on KZbin, service which very strongly filters any slight details of harsh reality to be published on platform and in current times censoring comments almost to mindless reddit level. KZbin is like 2D very narrow bubble in 3D world.

[@macdougdoug]

Would Idealism be a good argument in favour of "brain in a vat" type radical skepticism?

[@aniksamiurrahman6365]

I guess one of the roots of the problem is the concept of "truth" or more appropriately - the concept that truth lives seperately from observation. Probably connected to this is another thing: Philosophy of science almost always considers science detached from the the physical constrins of doing it, as well as underlying society that performs it. All the observation and testing take time, energy, effort etc. Since all of them are finite, this puts constrain on the extent on scientific endevour, and contributes to what will be seriously persued and what will not. For example, success in science gave us technological success that caused both: 1. Serious climate change 2. Severe social disparity. which in turn is visibly contributing to rise anti-scientific mentality, or even making doing science very difficult. Shouldn't those too be part of global picture of the philosophy of science?

[@ostihpem]

Kind of related question I discuss with a user right now, maybe there is some logician here who can clarify: „All statements are false“ is just a false statement, I know that and one can prove it. But what about „All statements could be false“. Is that a contingent statement, i.e. could turn out false or true, or is it necessarily true/false?

[@ostihpem]

I tried to answer my own question: We know that „All statements are false“ is false by logic (because if it is true it is false, contradiction, but if it is false it just means that not all statements are false, i.e. at least one is true but it does not need to be our statement but some other statement, no contradiction). But if „All statements are false“ is false by logic then its negation must be true by logic, i.e. necessarily true. So we have found a necessarily true statement which could never be false, proving a counterexample to make „All statements could be false“ false, and necessarily false that is.

[@Eta_Carinae__]

Wrt foundational physics: if all the objects of physics are just treated as free variables that satisfy some number of empirical constraints, then couldn't those be considered tautologically real?

[@EduardoRodriguez-du2vd]

Scientific is the production of functional and predictive models of some aspect of reality. The professional way of extracting knowledge from reality. One can use that model to act on reality and modify it as necessary and the result is more likely to be effective than with any other method of knowledge production. In any case, what are the alternative and different methods to the scientific one and what is their effectiveness when it comes to producing knowledge? Realism is the assumption of the existence of an external reality that is the basis of our mental activity. Regardless of whether it is completely accessible or only partially distinguishable. The point is that there is no minimally coherent model of perceived phenomena without resorting to the existence of reality and that we ourselves are included in it. It is inevitable that our understanding finds at some point that some phenomenon must be true as an apparently irreducible axiom. But one must be able to conceptually and functionally relate the different elements and systems that are apparently existing. The hypothesis that has more axioms and fewer clear relationships between its components and functionality is the least probable. Sorry for my bad English! :)

[@ErinDonnelly-y4t]

I think changes in scientific theory are just the theories becoming more precise, not more accurate. Miasma theory accurately described the way disease can spread between people and be caused by "gross" conditions. These things continue to be true, even though now we understand the underlying microscopic factors.

[@kimwelch4652]

Much of what we know in Physics is mathematical. Math is a language for describing relationships between phenomena. Our current physics math describes well the observed relationships. It all works, more or less. However, part of our conjectural space in physics is a set of conceptual explanations or models. The models do not work well because they are based on our direct human experience of analogous phenomena and not any direct experience with the phenomena we are trying to model. Our conceptual model of the photon is as a particle, or as a little indivisible ball of energy. Our math on the other hand describes a wave , or a radiating energy distribution pattern (i.e., likely interference pattern). Our conceptual model helped construct some of the math, but it is clearly wrong. This actually happens a lot in physics where our conceptual model of viruses in biology is much closer to reality because what we are describing is closer to our direct experience.

[@hiker-uy1bi]

Kane, do you consider yourself a naturalist? Or do you not take a personal position on metaphysics? I'm wondering if naturalism requires one to also consent to scientific realism. I don't think it does.

[@QuantumShenna]

HMMM. I think that some information theory would be very helpful for making assertions about this topic. Scientific theory can be seen as compression on the space of known correlations. From this, for scientific theory to be wrong, 1 of 2 things must be true: a. There is a theory that compresses known correlations better than existing scientific theory while being substantially different b. There are a large number of correlations that have not been detected or recorded erroneously which, taken together, cause science to compress poorly I'm fairly certain you could have a good shot at showing that a. is unlikely by measuring how well existing scientific theory compresses known correlations vs. a computed lower entropy bound. We could also have a shot at calculating how likely it is that enough correlations would be found to be incorrect to cause Science's compression to increase unacceptably above the lower entropy bound, given that correlations are always reported with a probability vs. the null hypothesis. Integrating new correlations into your calculus there seems significantly more challenging. I think that your analogy at 44:14 is actually remarkably apt, as, if scientific theory is compression, science can easily be seen as an optimization problem in a high dimensional space. Given this, there is also some indication that we are likely not trapped in a particularly deep local minima; arxiv.org/abs/1406.2572 and many more recent works provide evidence in that direction.

[@RokStembergar]

I drifted in and out in waves for this video, but on every in i was like :O

[@prenuptials5925]

I don't think the central lore argument actually holds up that well, I can actually quite easily imagine parts of the central lore being changed, discarded, replaced. Funny enough it's by way of reductionism. Much of the foundations of these theories or just whatever level down are still developing areas. These levels could totally uproot these parts of the central lore, the easiest example if newtonian mechanics. It was the discovery that light travels at a constant speed, the photoelectric effect, da da da da that ultimately led to special relativity, and then général relativity. Even now I can imagine much of evolution being reduced to thermodynamics, as that programme to me at least seems very promising. Like the rest of the realism circling scientific realism, WEEEAAAKKKKK. Sure I think some discoveries that simply postulate objects, not relations, are here to stay like mentioned viruses or DNA. But I think as far as science goes, postulates of the existance of objects alone are less likely to be changed than the relations they have

[@elia8544]

How do you reduce evolution to thermodynamics?

[@prenuptials5925]

@@elia8544 oof i don't know where to start with that, it's a pretty decently sized programme that started in 1944 with Shrodinger's book _What is Life_? i'm pretty sure there's a Wikipedia page which is a good start. basically think of the basic laws of thermodynamics, and how basically anything that physically/possibly happen, will happen. sitting here trying to fit molecular evolution and individual fitness into eloquent and short sentences for a youtube comment but can't, but i'm sure it'll make sense after the read

[@paulussturm6572]

Likewise. I’m not an expert in either, but I can see much of neurology and the science of intelligence being reduced down to some future form of systems science as the latter continues to incorporate the natural and formal sciences, for example. In general I think systems science will do that to a lot of scientific fields in the future.

[@prenuptials5925]

@@paulussturm6572 I'm actually in school for psych/neuro and there's a whole branch of systems neuroscience. It shares a lot with computational neuroscience as well and is very much integrated with computational neuroscience. Both have done tremendously in bringing AI to where it is today

[@tarvoc746]

The whole exclusion of fundamental physics makes this entire concept really dubious, no? Isn't fundamental physics pretty much the ontological basis for all these other things in the central lore? So if something radically new can emerge in this field, it should be able to call all the other fields into question, no?

[@MidwitObservations]

I haven't heard "lore" once. He's saying LAW. MY EARS CANT BE WRONG

[@executeorder6613]

I dunno. I’m feeling like a hearing antirealist right now.

[@norabelrose198]

I was listening to this video and not watching it and the entire time I thought you were saying "central law" instead of "central lore" lol

[@italogiardina8183]

A tautological bias in the form of: John is a virologist who looks at Marry who looks at Sam who is not a virologist. Question: Is a Virologist looking at a non virologist? There are three choices (a) yes (B) no (C) uncertain There are cases in popular culture where belief in the authority based on an institution eliminates opinion. This has been employed by mass consumerism and sales where a consumer who is opinionated on a big ticket uncertain purchase is referred to by sales as a 'tire kicker' given the consumer has seemingly chosen to go down the sales funnel and landed at a show room. The show room is based on tautological scientific realism in the guise of manufactured luxury items as a given civilisational state of affairs. Back to the question! The answer to the question is (a) because if Marry is not a virologist then a virologist is looking at a non virologist (John who is a virologist is looking a Mary) though if Mary is a virologist then a virologist is looking at a non virologist (Mary is looking as the non virologist Sam). What this suggests is once the structure is in place uncertainty is not reasonable and so tautology becomes an intrinsic form of social capital. Social poverty entails subjective bias that is not reasonable by standards of the social system based on science of that system. However the subject may claim to take a non modernist approach and reason there is subjective justification based on a form of idiosyncratic social absurdity. The bias from idiosyncratic absurdity is reasonable base on historical materialism that shifts the paradigm of civilisational tautological bias as a political anarchic stance to a body political science that forces a form of consumption that is not historically sound nor practiced by all current forms of culture in this current world political system given there are for example indigenous people who do not practice current medical science as advocated by WHO (World Health Organization).

[@Szylepiel]

Are you familiar with the 1953 paper by Milton Friedman "The Methodology of Positive Economics"? It's basically the methodological foundation of broadly accepted present-day mainstream economics. He argues against tautological scientific realism. Instead, he insists that "Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense) (p. 14)." You seem well informed and very competent in the the topic of scientific realism and its' criticism, so I would be interested in your comment about arguably the most important methodological paper in mainstream economics. Most of contemporary economics departments work with theories and models constructed on that foundation.

[@jolssoni2499]

Well, neoclassical economics leading neoliberal politics since the 1960s has been a disaster for the human race, so no surprises that Friedman was wrong.

[@veganphilosopher1975]

Great analysis; personally, I disagree with the notion that science is as systematized and coherent as experts would have us believe. Even in first-year chemistry, we were presented with a topic that had competing theories. Still, I want to hold on to theory for dear life less we replace all attempts at coherence with probabilistic models (which is where we're headed, I think).

[@justus4684]

10:30 Classic instance of: You want to threaten me with a position I am already (Arthur) Fine with?

[@bgiv2010]

As an Absurdist, I do use radical skepticism so yeah that's how I reject realism.

[@thealmightyaku-4153]

So you're a moron?

[@keylanoslokj1806]

Cope

[@bgiv2010]

@@keylanoslokj1806 with the vapidity of your response? I shall try, in earnest.

[@krzysztofciuba271]

Bingo: then you don't exist at all according to your own Absurd claim. Aristotle knew such moron claims already in the 4th cent.BCE!

[@Charlie-Em]

I recently become a scientist. This is weird to say, but I have a talent for it, I already had a degree in philosophy and had by now made money and could pursue my own adventures [though poverty never prevented me in the first place, but now I had money], so I started to get into science. But the reason I started to get into it was because with every Biology and Chemistry class I took, I realized more and more that the shamanic beliefs I grew up with were true. I'm Western Adjacent I would say, so I didn't grew up with the philosophical convictions of the West though I'm familiar with them, and when I came to science and philosophy, I inevitably had my own view on it that differs significantly. I of course keep it to myself and tell very few people that I'm a shaman in my real life and that I pursue science to further my shamanic endeavor. It would be very difficult to be a scientist otherwise. Anyway I figured I'd comment that. Interesting video though for sure bro keep it up!

[@dr.h8r]

Cool life story bruh

[@Charlie-Em]

@@dr.h8r that's about 0.01% of my life story. You don't get the rest.

[@owena7434]

I want to see more math - !P is only not conceivable if all of predicates being false is also not conceivable

[@owena7434]

And this is true because it's recursive

[@philopolymath]

AKA "how an Idiot deceives themselves"

[@delhatton]

Same old tempest in a teapot.

[@ostihpem]

Did guys like Priest really suspend LNC? All they did is they created meta-languages where LNC in the object language could be suspended. But that is just a shadow of the real LNC. The real LNC seems untouchable because else we could not make sense since when we talk x then ~x would apply also and nobody can make sense of it. Priest‘s dialethism or even trivialism needs LNC eventually, else nobody would understand what is talked about anyway. Logic in general seems the only untouchable place we have, the rest we can modifiy with our fantasy.

[@gwh0]

There isn't any "the truth".

[@justiceiria869]

And what makes you think that is true? We can't even deny truth without acknowledging it.

[@millerstation92]

tell Putin to press the red button if you think science is not the truth

[@elihyland4781]

Im already lost i love it

[@evanthesquirrel]

3:51 I disagree, sir. The homeric gods have given us far more knowledge and understanding than knowledge of electrons. I posit that without that awe and reverence to forces larger than ourselves and how they created us quite literally we learn and grow as men who can one day discover electrons. Puny science man think with puny imagination. Ignore things they don't understand so the data looks better.

[@TheMrGuyver]

You're totally confusing the map and the territory in your argument. Let's imagine someone made an incredibly detailed map of a city, which allows him to very successfully navigate a city. His map is made of paper and ink. Seeing the success of people using the map, you would surely conclude that the city is made of... paper and ink. You couldn't be more wrong. I advise you to read Hoffman's interface theory of perception and to meditate on the difference between predicting the behavior of an object and knowing its ontological nature. Another analogy to lead you on the path: The world champion at counter strike is excellent at predicting the behavior of objects and other players. Does he therefore know what objects in the game are REALLY made of? I mean, 1's and 0's on a hard drive, buffer memory, RGB LEDs, layers of programming, graphic rendering algorithms and so on? Of course not! Truth is, no one knows anything about what space, time, consciousness, matter and energy are REALLY made of. We just know what they feel like.

[@KaneB]

It's not my argument. I expected this would be clear from the many times throughout the video that I attributed the argument to somebody else (Carl Hoefer).

[@jamestang1227]

I'm a philosophical layman geologist but I'll give my two cents. I feel you're somewhat talking past the point of the argument proving things other than fundamental physics appraoch truth. As a geologist, my field is concerned with knowing if our predictions of how objects have changed are broadly true. I am not intersted in the fundamental ontogeny of the rocks I study, but I want to make sure I can rely on our models of geologic time and know that the Jurassic period was a true period of time that actually happened that came before the Cretaceous. To continue with the counter strike example, geologists (and virologists, chemists, material scientists) are more concerned that their guns work and they understand its recoil patterns. Whether they're real people or in a video game is irrelevant to those aims, which is why I find myself sympathetic to the view outlined.

[@lordsneed9418]

What is le heckin real??

[@executeorder6613]

You are.

[@TotalNigelFargothDeath]

Prove it.

[@executeorder6613]

@@TotalNigelFargothDeath ' I can't. But you can if you are real.

[@TotalNigelFargothDeath]

@@executeorder6613 And what if I'm not real?

[@executeorder6613]

@@TotalNigelFargothDeath Well, if you're not real, you can't prove shit.

[@notloki3377]

Hume put the nail in the coffin of scientific realism.

[@johannesheinle2822]

Why so?

[@jrkirby93]

Here's a 'conceivable' rejection of the "central lore" of science, alternate to radical skepticism. I call it the belief consistency machine hypothesis. ``` The core dictating factor of the outcome of an experiment is belief and consistency. What the people believe, how strongly they believe it, and how many people believe is actually what makes things happen the way they happen. If everyone strongly believes that gods are determining their reality, then reality will behave in line with with that orthodoxy. Science works, not because it has written down some fundamental truths of the world, but because it is a robust system for forming, documenting, and gaining faith in, specific beliefs. If all evidence of an observation were obliterated, including the observer, then a similar experimental observation could have a different outcome consistent with the natural world. But since we keep writing it down, sharing experimental results, and believing each other, there becomes a consensus, which we teach to our students, further solidifying it's reliability. At the core of it, is that any given moment, the sum of observations that are alive in each of our minds must have a consistent, reliable explanation. That explanation doesn't have to be the "central lore" of modern science, but if you have connection to millions or billions of people with such an empowered faith in the "central lore", then all your observations will also be in line with the central lore. Disconnected, you might be able to have experiments in direct contradiction. But when you can walk down the street, or publish on the internet, replicating your experiments in front of others, then the results will not be able contradict something that millions of people believe. ``` Of course, the belief consistency machine hypothesis is unfalsifiable, as anything that contradicts modern science in 2024 inevitably will be.

[@LordBlk]

I thought it ironic to show bacteriophages in youuur thumbnail. Because that is the old veiw of what was thought to be a virus. And after covid....in my research, that is one area of science that has some pretty spotty lore

[@cwpeterson87]

How could a tautological framework ever be useful?

[@ready1fire1aim1]

Don't hijack Leibniz's Realist camp....

[@catalyst3713]

Even if scientific theories did turn out go be radially wrong, there is no rational or empirical justifiaction for believing such, so entertaining such an idea is entirely pointless.

[@christopherellis2663]

Anything like " sea turtle, honey bee, and fez cap"? Tautology as stupid thing

[@GeorgWilde]

Yeah. I'm agnostic even about common sense beliefs. Definitely anti-realism. I don't see the advantage of this tautological realism. It's like "i want to have strong a-priori global beliefs". And i'd rather be epistemologically humble.

[@anywallsocket]

what the heck are you on about?

[@davidbeta8969]

esto es filosofia no ciencia

[@millerstation92]

no se precisa de la filosofía para entender que el fisicalismo es la verdad. SI se precisa de la filosofía para engañarse a uno mismo y a otros de que el fisicalismo no es la verdad

[@Memry-Man]

That's good y you understand how controversial you're ideas are, not being a "realist" I completely disagree,,,,, probes to pluto😂😂😂

[@doltBmB]

except your examples of what science "remarkably" predicts are all easily disproven, what's really remarkable is how much, how thoroughly and how consistently science lies.

[@millerstation92]

yeah tell Putin to press the red button if you think science lies, you low-IQ sophist piece of chit

[@sauerkrautlanguage]

vulgar scientism under a different disguise 😪

[@elia8544]

How so?