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| Alpha Meme |
Precisely as when I throw a coin so that one me will find itself with heads while the one who will have found tails will be the one who has found tails, so also, at least as long as we have no certainty about what must be rather than what can be, it is equally conceivable that tomorrow we have found clear evidence for that black holes Hawking radiate while in another slightly different variety of worlds, we find ourselves with that black holes do not Hawking radiate, and why would it have to be that we can ever find out whether not both possibilities are instantiated in their own worlds, self-consistently so in all the ways consistency may or may not even be necessary.
Experimental evidence only tells you in what kind of world you happen to have found yourself, for example, one where evidence points strongly toward Higgs bosons and where you also never won the national lottery jackpot. That does not at all mean that those who predicted Higgs bosons were any more correct than those who predicted that you would not win the jackpot.
They are correct now, in this possibility, and therefore it is that experiment is important, namely, in order to decrease the uncertainty about how the world is in far as it is relevant for us practically, such as whether you have won the lottery. For that, it is better to constrain otherwise still uncertain parameters, for which it is just as well if you thus must partially construct them.
The use of a scientist, especially in the reality of science today, is not so much to turn out correct, or even just to turn up anything directly useful. It is rather, apart from roles such as stabilization of particular social structures, to provide toward a large background of potentiality out of which emerges the later seemingly correct or useful. The correct can only ever be held more or less obvious much later, because it is relative to whether they did then turn out that way in that world, and even then it is never certain before it is not certain, and we are usually mistaken about that.
Who is to say, perhaps if we had rejected science and embraced a particular sort of religion, what would have become of us could be healthier or happier or already know much further in those perhaps meditatively and by racist selection in different dark ages expanded brains, via philosophical routes, how subjective experience and physicalist description fit together, and whether it is thus obvious that black holes have to be a certain way in all worlds.
You do not call that science? I say that light is what seems shining through darkness made transparent, and so illuminated I discover that the light is coming out of my own heart.
Certainty, so the naïve scientistic say, is to be found in experimental verification. This is true and false. Fundamental certainty is only found in philosophy, and it says there is none. The scientistic truth is an impoverished concept, an always bracketed one. Some postmodernists called science “fashionable nonsense.” Those who know science will also know that this is an outrageous, misinformed, even dangerous affront. Only who has mastered science, knows the truth of it. Of course science is fashionable nonsense.
It is widely expected that the Theory of Everything (of totality as well as in the sense of a general relativistic quantum theory) needs to be “crazy.” How can we select a likely contender out of the background noise of crazy ideas in order to scrutinize the candidate?
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Source: Science 2.0
