Cowabungaa said:
CrystalShadow said:
Most significantly, science relies on the premise that there are a set of rules underlying reality which do not change.
Where did you get that from? First time I heard that. Sounds quite silly to me since science is all about change. Fundamental laws showing to not be so solid as thought is the wet dream of many scientists, they'd have a field day.
It's based on basic observation of how science functions. Show me any scientific theory or hypothesis that would survive as a meaningful description of anything at all if it didn't follow a consistent set of rules.
I'm not talking about meta-rules here; Like maybe it's possible to 'break' the first law of thermodynamics using some known, predictable process.
If you think science is about change, I doubt you've dealt much with physics.
Yes, I did come across some interesting speculation once that implied there was some evidence some of the fundamental constants were different in the past.
But that's still quite different from saying one day the laws of gravity work by one set of rules, and the next, they suddenly have totally different rules. Then they change back again for no apparent reason.
Sure, you can try to deduce scientifically what the cause of this change is. But in so doing you are presuming there is some pattern to this change.
(In other words, you are pre-supposing there is a rule that shows why things change. If no such rule can be found, the scientist is unlikely to conclude no such rule exists. Merely that they cannot identify what it is.)
I have literally never come across any scientific theory, law, hypothesis, or even idle speculation that didn't depend on the idea that there is (at least in theory) some identifiable rule or pattern underlying whatever the idea relates to.
Change is still a pattern if you can define a rule that describes it. I'm sure you'd find that if any scientific laws did just change randomly, scientists would try and deduce
why - In other words, they'd be looking for a pattern or rule that describes how these changes come about.
It's the predictive power of these patterns and rules that dictates the utility of science.
(It also means you could apply the scientific method to 'magic' - if it existed. As long as that 'magic' obeyed any kind of consistent set of rules, the scientific method would be useful in studying it. On the other hand, one of the most problematic possible concepts would be belief-based reality. Which is the idea that whatever you believe to be true is what is true. - Evidence shows this isn't the case (that we know of), but the consequences of such a situation would make reality subjective. And subjectivity is something science is extraordinary bad at dealing with because it's almost impossible to measure in any way that produces any real consistency. - It lacks stable rules, and whatever rules it does have cannot really be verified independently.)
Anyway, I'm not sure that's made it any clearer what I mean, but I'm afraid it's a very difficult concept to describe. Think of it in terms of the difference between true randomness, and a very complicated, yet ultimately predictable pattern.
If the world was random, you could use the scientific method, but it would be no more useful than any other philosophy.
Yet, where there is a predictable pattern, no matter how complicated it might be, science gives you the tools to identify and describe the pattern.
If the pattern changes without warning, the innate assumption implicit in science is not that there was no reason for the change, but rather that the pre-existing models are incomplete, and that this change was the result of a previously unknown rule of some kind.
Cause and effect is implicit in science's understanding of change.
Now, having said all that, this isn't to say there's anything at all wrong with science. In fact, all the evidence shows the presumptions science makes are perfectly valid.
But then, while it's possible to identify what some of those assumptions are, it's incredibly difficult to actually conceive of what reality would look like if those assumptions were false.
What you were suggesting just doesn't even begin to describe it.
Well, I could keep going here, but I don't think that'll help. Unfortunately, this problem goes deeper than science alone. It partially clashes with logic itself. And since language is also dependent on logic to remain comprehensible...
