Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On Mon, 9 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 08/12/2024 20:49, D wrote:

  On Sun, 8 Dec 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

On 08/12/2024 05:31, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

On 12/7/24 6:59 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 06/12/2024 17:12, D wrote:

If you postulate something which can never be known, it is kind of useless. It goes the same way as god, or a postulated first mover etc.

 And yet that is what people do all the time. In fact it is the necessary foundation of thinking.
 All metaphysics - and we all use it, whether we understand that we do or not -  is to assume the framework for our understanding, and use it not because it is demonstrably true, but because it *works* for us.
 We don't  and can't *know* that time and space exist - at least in the way we understand them, but they do *work* for us, the way we understand them.

    Careful ... the "luminiferous aether" WORKED - at least
   with the existing physics  :-)
 

Exactly. That was Karl Poppers point. We don't discover the  laws, we actually make them up, and if they work, we use them.

 If you are interested, Bas van Fraassen probably has some interesting things to add as well. There was also a german guy who wrote something interesting in the 1920s I think on that theme, but for the moment the name does not come back to me.
 

>

Ahh, here we go!
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_%27As_if%27 .
 

Yes. That is exactly what I meant.
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Except more so, He argues that if it works, even if its wrong, its OK.
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My point goes further. We can never know for sure if its *right* so the *only* criteria we can have is that it works.
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Which was where Karl Popper came in. He arrived at that point and wanted to clarify what separated good science from bullshit.
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And pseudo scientists have been trying to shout him down ever since

I think you might enjoy the book The Shaky Game - Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory.
An excerpt...
"Realism is dead. Its death was announced by the neopositivists who realized that they could accept all the results of science, including all the members of the scientific zoo, and still declare that the questions raised by the existence claims of realism were mere pseudo- questions. Its death was hastened by the debates over the inter- pretation of quantum theory, where Bohr's nonrealist philosophy was seen to win out over Einstein's passionate realism. Its death was certified, finally, as the last two generations of physical scientists turned their backs on realism and have managed, nevertheless, to do science successfully without it. To be sure, some recent philo- sophical literature has appeared to pump up the ghostly shell and to give it new life. I think these efforts will eventually be seen and understood as the first stage in the process of mourning, the stage of denial. But I think we shall pass through this first stage and into that of acceptance, for realism is well and truly dead, and we have work to get on with, in identifying a suitable successor."
Let me know if you would like to read more, and I can get you the book in electronic format (unless you haven't read it already).