Antigravity mouse droppings

[Triple Zero]

Maybe it was actually an oak tree.

[Jasper]

I want to point out the obvious, so skip this post if you don't feel like hearing it.

Epistemology calls for a certain amount of honesty with oneself, which means accepting a small amount of "fuck it, I don't know" when it comes to the highest and lowest levels of reality, ultimate questions about why anything, et cetera.  Some things can't be known by their very nature.  But the important thing is that some things can be known.  They really can.  The problem I have with oak trees that look like glasses of water is that they turn a small amount of unknowability into a sensational mystery.  The fact is that we can never KNOW that anything exists as we see it, but that hasn't stopped us yet.  Every theory is a map that assumes a corresponding territory exists, but it only assumes that insofar as the map takes you where you think you're going.  The territory need not exist if the map is demonstrably effective.  Take quarks.  We can NEVER, ever observe them directly, but our best theoretical models and observational data are best explained by their existence.  It is possible to make a subatomic particle theory that explains observations without quarks, and if the theory sans quarks worked just as well as ours, it would be EQUALLY TRUE, because a theory is just a model that deals in observations.  The oak tree/water glass theory is "not true" because it is conceptually dishonest, observably meaningless, and oh yeah, Fucking Stupid.  Epistemologically, realism is far superior; the stance that the thing that looks like a glass of water is actually what it seems, and the shit exists in more than just your mind.  "Mind", meaning brain?  Maybe.  But brains would not evolve to see glasses of water in place of oak trees.  There is no evolutionary pressure not to see things as close to what they are as economically possible (the brain makes do with less information than you may think, and it does deceive itself, but mainly for sociocognitive reasons).  But better than realism is model-dependent realism, the stance that since no one model can accurately describe reality at all levels, it is acceptable to use many independent theories to model and predict reality, and where they overlap, they agree.  For instance, there is nothing about atoms that theoretically portend social psychology, yet theories of social psychology can accurately predict human behaviors.  Realism doesn't account for this as well as model dependent realism.  As long as your various theories overlap harmoniously, and are each "good" theories, the things in each theory can be said to "exist", to as much certainty as is afforded to us, lacking our god's eye view of things.

It is not enough to say that a thing only exists in your mind.  It must exist within a model that sufficiently predicts observations.

[Cain]

Yeah, well, that's just like your opinion and stuff, man.

[Cramulus]

The OP reminds me of a point put forth in Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. They are sociologists which station themselves inside a hormone research facility to study the social factors which influence the creation of "facts".

One of their points is that when we slap a label on something and treat it as true, it negates any of the complexity contained under that label.


For example, the hormone lab had hypothesized this hormone called TRF, the existence of which would explain a number of things they were observing.

Lots of papers about TRF were written. There was a lot of debate about it. But at some point, it passed a threshold -- you can tell when it became "real". It was the point at which credible scientists started including TRF in their explanations about how things work. (there's a lot of very interesting talk about how a scientist gathers and spends credibility like a form of currency, but that's tangential to this point)

Years later, they were trying to synthesize TRF. Literally hundreds of goats were sacrificed to create a microscopic amount of TRF. And in the end, they didn't succeed!


Some more science took place.

And this was their eventual discover: this TRF hormone wasn't actually real! Their confidence was misplaced, it was a mistake the whole time.


When TRF became a "fact", all the cloudiness and confusion about TRF was just swept under the rug. Any of the methodological problems involved in TRF research became invisible -- until TRF was later discovered to be a fiction, and then those methods came into question.


So to me, this underscores a basic point about how we make reality - these labels we use are only a short hand, and they themselves contain a bit of complexity, a bit more of the story than we may be comfortable with. But we have to abbreviate these things - we can't communicate all that uncertainty otherwise we'd never get anything done.


food for thought, for me at least