Collecting Questions & Objections About The Limits Of Science

[Carl-Richard]

10 hours ago, Raphael said:

Isn't it that there is a minimum common reality?

After all if a group of people can communicate, coordinate and live together by using tools like language and social norms, it means that they perceive reality similarly. At least if they are part of the same culture and are a minimum functioning.

In this case science is true for them if they at least adhere to the same cultural standards. But relative from group to groups.

You're assuming that shared behavior means shared experience. This doesn't have to be the case. You could display the same behavior with different stimuli (and vice versa) and the same stimuli can be perceived in different ways. An alien without our sense organs would also probably not agree with "a minimum common reality".

The idea you're referring to has been given many names throughout history by people like Aristoteles and John Locke (the idea that certain qualities are perceivable through mutiple senses like form, size, movement etc.). They contrasted this with the more relativistic sense qualities like heat, colour etc. (more prone to adaptation).

They used this to argue that we do infact have access to some shared reality, but this has been challenged by more modern models like "top-down" perceptual processing (their models assume "bottom-up" processing). Top-down processing describes how sense qualities like form, size and distance are subject to conditioning instead of being innate to the perceptual system.

Edited November 22, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[Raphael]

21 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

You're assuming that shared behavior means shared experience. This doesn't have to be the case. You could display the same behavior with different stimuli (and vice versa) and the same stimuli can be perceived in different ways. An alien without our sense organs would also probably not agree with "a minimum common reality".

Like if I say hello to two persons in front of me and both respond "hello"? They both respond "hello" (same behavior), but one can have better audition and both are not at the exact same position so they see me differently (different experience).

[Carl-Richard]

5 hours ago, Raphael said:

Like if I say hello to two persons in front of me and both respond "hello"? They both respond "hello" (same behavior), but one can have better audition and both are not at the exact same position so they see me differently (different experience).

It could be even worse than that. A person hears himself say "hello" and you hear "banana". You say "banana" back, and now he thinks you heard him say "hello". Don't underestimate the potential diversity of other people's perspectives.

Now this doesn't negate the fact that all is one and there is only God. We have to distinguish between the relative and the absolute.

Edited November 23, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[Anderz]

@Leo Gura Leo, I think you forgot to mention entropy in your science videos. Leonard Susskind said that entropy is simply hidden information. And if we assume that reality as nonduality is perfect order, then what we believe to be disorder, decay, destruction and randomness actually also is order.

This has profound consequences for how to perceive the universe. From a perspective of entropy as disorder we see the universe as a deteriorating machine while with entropy as order we would be able to see the universe as an intelligent system.

You did mention that since humans have intelligence, the universe has intelligence, but I think that by examining entropy it can be made into a more general understanding of how the entire universe has vast intelligence. You have also mentioned that reality is infinite intelligence, and that's something that also may be possible to show by understanding entropy.

Edited November 24, 2020 by Anderz

[Raphael]

On 11/24/2020 at 0:42 AM, Carl-Richard said:

It could be even worse than that. A person hears himself say "hello" and you hear "banana". You say "banana" back, and now he thinks you heard him say "hello". Don't underestimate the potential diversity of other people's perspectives.

Yeah, that can happen, but this is rare.

On 11/24/2020 at 0:42 AM, Carl-Richard said:

Now this doesn't negate the fact that all is one and there is only God. We have to distinguish between the relative and the absolute.

I was thinking about that and it seemed to me difficult to say that all experiences are completly different because we are all interconnected pieces of the same puzzle.

Isn't it that even if experiences are differents from one individual to another one, they can still at least share some kernels of a similar reality? It's seems incorrect for me to say that reality is 100% different for each human beings on the planet.

[Jodistrict]

I attended a zoom talk the other day featuring Shinzen Young.   He has been involved with several studies, including at Yale, investigating meditation with neuroscience.   This is particularly exciting because Shinzen understands the enlightenment process and all the stages and believes science and technology can be used to assist the process.  In the talk, he was mentioning possible “boosters” to meditation, such as yoga.  He actually mentioned microdosing psychedelics to boost meditation but didn’t go into detail.  Could it be possible that the present science based on the materialistic paradigm could be adequate to come up with a reliable method for attaining enlightenment?

  https://www.shinzen.org/
 

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, Raphael said:

Yeah, that can happen, but this is rare.

How do you know that?

 

6 hours ago, Raphael said:

Isn't it that even if experiences are differents from one individual to another one, they can still at least share some kernels of a similar reality? It's seems incorrect for me to say that reality is 100% different for each human beings on the planet.

From an absolute perspective, you can only experience yourself. There are no "other people". From a relative perspective, you can start to divide this oneness (yourself) into separate parts (self and other), and then you can start to talk about your perspective vs. other people's perspective.

These perspectives are obviously different, and the point isn't to which degree they're different. Just the mere fact that they're different means that they're not the same. If two people sit down and each draw a picture of the same flower, the two different pictures are not the same picture.

Does this mean they're 100% not the same picture? In a sense, yes. They're two pictures, not one. The real question is "what is the flower?". Well, you can't define the flower in an absolute sense. It's a result of an infinite groundless process. From a relative perspective, they're not seeing the same flower, or they are experiencing the same flower (relatively speaking). From an absolute perspective, there is no flower, no pictures, no perspectives.

Edited November 25, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[Raphael]

17 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

How do you know that?

Ok. I see, I'm making an assumption here.

17 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Does this mean they're 100% not the same picture?

But some patterns are repeating, no? Can't we categorize the pattern to create an imaginary common reality?

I have some difficulties to grasps what you are saying, it's seems like my mind can't compute. Do I need to go beyond the mind to understand what you mean?

[Ivan Dimi]

Brilliant conversation I see as addition to Leo's trilogy Deconstructing The Myth Of Science:

 

[Rilles]

Question for video: Is Evolution our modern day creation myth? 

[Carl-Richard]

On 26.11.2020 at 5:06 PM, Raphael said:

Ok. I see, I'm making an assumption here.

But some patterns are repeating, no? Can't we categorize the pattern to create an imaginary common reality?

I have some difficulties to grasps what you are saying, it's seems like my mind can't compute. Do I need to go beyond the mind to understand what you mean?

I apologize for my formulation being overly complicated. Let me try again:

You're scratching at something that appears to be a paradox and a self-contradiction, but that is only from the perspective of the mind, because the mind only sees relativity. The point I'm getting at is that the world is simultaneously rich in differences while at the same time being all the same. It all depends on which perspective you take (the relative and the absolute). The absolute is only accessible through direct experience.

Edited November 27, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

On 11/25/2020 at 8:46 AM, Raphael said:

Yeah, that can happen, but this is rare.

I was thinking about that and it seemed to me difficult to say that all experiences are completly different because we are all interconnected pieces of the same puzzle.

Isn't it that even if experiences are differents from one individual to another one, they can still at least share some kernels of a similar reality? It's seems incorrect for me to say that reality is 100% different for each human beings on the planet.

Science can't even prove if other people exist.

[Raphael]

19 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I apologize for my formulation being overly complicated. Let me try again:

You're scratching at something that appears to be a paradox and a self-contradiction, but that is only from the perspective of the mind, because the mind only sees relativity. The point I'm getting at is that the world is simultaneously rich in differences while at the same time being all the same. It all depends on which perspective you take (the relative and the absolute). The absolute is only accessible through direct experience.

So... If I try to understand:

• From a materialistic perspective, I can say that there is an objective common reality
• From a (I don't know how to call this) post-modernism perspective (maybe?), reality is different for all individuals even if they can have common behaviours
• From the perspective of a mature mind, reality is always relative

And the above points make sense, but only from a certain perspective.

However, beyond the mind, reality stop to be relative and become whole again because only the mind see relativity. And, as the mind is an illusion, it can only see itself from itself (and refer to itself by using a pointing word like "mind") and create perspectives which are illusions because the base is groundless.

I feel like I'm messing things up

19 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The point I'm getting at is that the world is simultaneously rich in differences while at the same time being all the same.

Like if I have two paint buckets?

For example: a blue one and a green one. If they are separated, we can clearly see the blue and the green, but if I mix them together they become one. The new texture is the only thing, but at the same time, this thing is blue and green.

[Anderz]

I heard that Kurt Gödel used numbers to show that all mathematics is incomplete. But isn't that a begging the question logical fallacy or what it's called? How can he have used numbers as the foundation for his argument and at the same time claiming that the theory of numbers in incomplete?

[Carl-Richard]

28 minutes ago, Anderz said:

I heard that Kurt Gödel used numbers to show that all mathematics is incomplete. But isn't that a begging the question logical fallacy or what it's called? How can he have used numbers as the foundation for his argument and at the same time claiming that the theory of numbers in incomplete?

Is it possible to use language to figure out that language is incomplete?

[Anderz]

@Carl-Richard I found:

Quote

"A set of axioms is (syntactically, or negation-) complete if, for any statement in the axioms' language, that statement or its negation is provable from the axioms (Smith 2007, p.  24). This is the notion relevant for Gödel's first Incompleteness theorem. It is not to be confused with semantic completeness, which means that the set of axioms proves all the semantic tautologies of the given language."

I tried to understand Gödel's incompleteness theorems from the Wikipedia article and by looking at a few videos about it. I still don't grasp it! Frustrating. Leo has this video about it which I may take a look at again.

 

[Anderz]

@Leo Gura Wow, I found that Bertrand Russell may only have accepted Gödel's incompleteness theorems as metamathematics, such as:

Quote

"For example, there is mathematics, but however mathematics may be defined, there will be statements about mathematics which will belong to 'metamathematics', and must be excluded from mathematics on pain of contradiction." - Bertrand Russell, Logical Positivism

I learned that Gödel encoded the theorems in Principia Mathematica as numbers and then drew logical conclusions from that. That approach indeed seems to be metamathematics, an additional construct put on top of the theorems.

And also:

Quote

"Russell's comments on Gödel were scanty, but it was very unlikely that Russell did not understand what Gödel was talking about. The paradox presented by Gödel sentence was nothing new; it was the same old vicious circle paradox, which had been abundantly dispelled by Russell's Theory of Types[source 1]. Russell discovered the Theory of Types in 1906. The Theory of Types provided no shelter for vicious circles.[source 3] On the other hand, Gödel's raising this paradox anew in 1931 indicated that Gödel probably never understood Russell's Theory of Types.

In Russell's Theory of Types, meaning is fundamental. A self-referential sentence G's meaning cannot be determined until each of its constituent's meaning is determined; one of G's constituent is G itself, thus G's meaning cannot be determined because G contains a vicious circle.

No proposition can say anything about itself, because the propositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the "whole theory of types"). - Wittegenstein, Tractatus 3.332

Gödel, from formalist's point of view, regarded symbols in PM as meaningless empty signs[source 9], and, by means of numbering, Gödel managed to show that G belonged to the body of propositions for which PM was supposed to be a foundation - this was the point of contention: by Russell's type theory, G had no meanings and thus did not belong to the body of propositions: all self-referential sentences were specifically weeded out by theory of types as nonsensical. Gödel's attack on Principia was similar to planting a bag of weed in one's roommate’s car then accusing him of illegal possession of drugs, or to accusing one's room-mate, who was actually speaking another language on the phone, of making threats about the President of the United States

The root of the problem was formalists' disregard for meanings. In Russell's 1937's "Introduction To The Second Edition" of The Principles of Mathematics, Russell categorically dismissed formalists:

The formalists are like a watchmaker who is so absorbed in making his watches look pretty that he has forgotten their purpose of telling the time, and has therefore omitted to insert any works." - https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/3951/did-russell-understand-gödels-incompleteness-theorems

Russell did acknowledge Gödel's result:

Quote

"A new set of puzzles has resulted from the work of Godel, especially his article "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme" (1931), in which he proved that in any formal system it is possible to construct sentences of which the truth or falsehood cannot be decided within the system. Here again we are faced with the essential necessity of a hierarchy, extending upwards ad infinitum, and logically incapable of completion." - Bertrand Russell, Logical Positivism

But could it be that Gödel's incompleteness theorems have been taken too broadly? And that for example the theory of types is consistent and complete by removing self-reference?

Edited December 13, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

I now noticed that Leo has already mentioned that Gödel's incompleteness theorems use self-reference in his video. So that has already been covered. But I'm still confused about how Gödel achieved his proof using a sentence (sometimes called G):

Quote

"The Gödel sentence is designed to refer, indirectly, to itself. The sentence states that, when a particular sequence of steps is used to construct another sentence, that constructed sentence will not be provable in F. However, the sequence of steps is such that the constructed sentence turns out to be GF itself. In this way, the Gödel sentence GF indirectly states its own unprovability within F (Smith 2007, p. 135)." - Wikipedia

It seems to me that what Gödel did is like using the English alphabet and then claiming that when only using letters A to Z there are words that cannot be constructed from those letters.

[Anderz]

Can any system say anything about itself? I doubt that. What I believe happens is that people put their own interpretations into the system. And that's a meta perspective outside of the system. For example the entire internet is nothing but a bunch of ones and zeros. The internet can't say anything about itself. It's our human interpretations we add onto the internet that produce the meaning we get out of the information.

And in the same way what I suspect Gödel did was to put his own meta perspective on top of Principia Mathematica. It's not as someone said in the quote I posted earlier that Gödel disregarded meaning. On the contrary, Gödel added his own meaning in the form of a meta perspective and plastered that on top of the theory of types.

[peqkno]

How science is stuck in the categories of the mind.

Once example I found mindblowing to ponder (I from a video on Leo's blog, paraphrased here) was that man and women aren't objectively real. That chromosomes, etc. are just begging the questions. That first we humans had the category of man/woman in mind and then used science to prove they were real, which essentially is question begging.