About condescendence, you are the one being absolutely condescending towards the use of words, their meanings and the philosophical backgrounds I have brought here as arguments against your view that everything can be summarized the way you are doing here. Again, you present your views without confronting them against what I said. Did you even register what I tried to tell you about induction here? I think not.
You're posting so many things I disagree with that I have to pick the parts I disagree with most, otherwise my posts will end up looking like a demented quote ladder.
But I'll bite. For now.
And what happens when scientists notice a phenomenon they don't quite know what to make out of? They observe it, document it, experiment with it, until they get an idea about how it works, and then start formulating hypotheses to form theories about what's going on. Hence the inverse of Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.
This is abductive induction. You cannot make this induction. Yes, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, but the reverse does not follow from that same sentence. It does not matter how amazing the scientific method is, it can never even state anything about any *thing* that falls beyond its probing capabilties (either technical or theoretical). So you cannot ever say it is a "logical impossibility". That's just pure nonsense.
It's not abductive (in that it doesn't involve guessing). Here's the logical chain:
-let us assume that Magic can be observed
-observed things can be scientifically analyzed
-Magic can be scientifically analyzed
In the last line you have something that contradicts with the classical definition of magic, which implies it being something supernatural.
Excluding pure chaos, there is always some kind of underlying ruleset behind things, and scientific analysis is the best utility to uncover said rules.
Hence, after sufficient analysis, magic loses its supernatural apperance, and becomes an applied science - although it probably still would be referred to as magic, due to legacy reasons.
The stage at which this transition can be said to happen depends on what this particular species of magic can do and how easy it is to analyze and predict.
I truly don't see what's so complicated about this.
For instance, when you say "stop talking about metaphysics" I really think you have no idea what you are talking about, because this is what you have been doing here for too damn long now, perhaps without conscience of it. If you are a physicalist, then that's your metaphysical position. You can't both try to shove your metaphysics down this thread's throat and demand others stop talking about it.
No, it's my physical world view. Hence my arguing from it to show that in my view, agnosticism is not a scientific world view and DEFINITELY not a "natural result" of scientific method. I'm less interested in discussing the actual metaphysics than the consequences of a metaphysical position that I think best adheres to scientific method.
See, the consideration of metaphysics as an actual thing is fully dependant on your view on physics. It's in the etymology of the word - metaphysics means, approximately, "after physics".
If, like I, one considers everything that exists to be firmly in the realm of
physics, there is simply no relevance in discussing metaphysics.
Thing is, such a belief isn't exactly grounded in the most rational approach to the universe. It's basically saying "All that exists is what I see and nothing more". Which is an obvious fallacy.
It's also incorrect definition of physicalism. Physicalism has nothing to do with "what I see and nothing more".
It merely states that, to quote wikipedia, "everything that exists is physical, that is, that there are no things other than physical things." Or in my words earlier in the thread, everything is no more than sum of its physical characteristics. There's nothing about subjective observability in physicalism - perhaps you mixed it up with something else?
Now, one should also be careful not to open up our minds to crazy woo, and so on. The correct path here is to forgo the notion of an objective reality and stop trying to speak for the entire universe what it can and what it cannot do. Agnostics are "positivists" (in the Stephen Hawking sense), in the way that we use terms and concepts in science that do not explain the objects in themselves, but rather patterns and symmetries that we detect, where what matters is how predictive we are and not the final words about what things like "Time" really are or not.
This means forgoing any claims about the Real World, and that includes the supernatural. We cannot say whether really magical realms exist or not.
Sure we can. Easiest way to do so is simply state that if the supposed magical realms exist, then their magicality is a perfectly natural part of universe (ie. not so magical after all).
Nihil supernum.
The realms may exist - of THAT we can have no opinion for or against without information - but they are not magical.
Or, the whole universe is magical. Take your pick.
Otherwise you'll have to create all sorts of definitions that specify which things are mundane and which things are magical...
The best we can say about the subject is that we have no means to discuss it other than a scientific, rational way, and that if such realms escape this kind of description, then we should just better not talk about them at all. This fundamental gap between the supernatural and the natural is not something that I invented. Again, if you had read any material about the subject, you'd see that this gap is pretty much established as such by most theologians through time. (What christians did regarding this subject is a wholly different beast, that we could eventually discuss in other venues).
Theology is another topic I really have very little interest in.
Regarding absolutist statements: You're putting words in my mouth. I did not say that science will always find a way to solve a problem, or that it will eventually arrive to "absolute truth" about anything. What I'm saying is that if something is fundamentally observable, then science can make statements of it. It can make measurements and hypotheses and theories; how well these actually work to describe the phenomenon is subject to incremental improvements, and like you said, scientific knowledge is never absolute but relative.
I am really frustrated at this conversation. I have said again and again that supernaturality is something that is just beyond the scientific method. Of course that if this is the case, then you cannot just "observe it". And of course that the parts of it that you can, then we will deal with them "scientifically". However, the idea that science can "make statements about it" is somewhat vague and really not promising. Everyone can make statements!
Yes. What makes a statement scientific is that it includes some empirical data.
If you think you're frustrated, try me. I have been saying the whole conversation that it is impossible for something to exist without being subject to measurements and other tools of scientific method, and that's my main argument as to why I think supernatural is, in itself, a contradiction.
The quality of observations usually determines how accurate the hypotheses made from them are.
What I was trying to point at is that if something physically exists and influences the world as we know it, then we can obviously make scientific statements out of it. Even if it's just "this happened and I have no idea why".
Hardly a scientific statement. It is barely scientific in the sense that it merely does what it can against the impossible, which is nothing.
It's certainly more scientific than saying "this happened, and no one can ever know why because it's supernatural".
And it's infinitely more scientific than saying "ok, this thing exists, but it cannot be observed, and it cannot ever be understood by science"... which is, of course, much more common approach to claims of supernatural things existing. It is the core argument of both gnosticism and theism.
Even if we suppose a one-way interaction where supernatural spirits can observe our universe but not influence it in any way (and quantum mechanics would like to have a word with these spirits), they would still fundamentally be part of everything that exists, and they would have some sort of rules governing their existence.
Says who? You? Who are you to demand such things? Don't you see the arrogance of these statements?
Yes, I say so. It's not a demand, it's a logical conclusion of the premises I'm working with.
The simplest definition of universe (or cosmos) is that it includes everything that exists.
And, since I'm arguing from physicalist point of view, to me existence is something physical; an interaction or substance. This means, again from physicalist point of view, that if we imagine an entity "outside" universe suddenly starting to interact with our universe, then suddenly you can draw a bigger Venn diagram circle around the universe AND that entity, and re-label that as "the universe".
By interacting with the universe, hypothetical extra-universal beings would incorporate themselves into our definition of existence.
And no, I don't really see what's arrogant about that.
And what "rules" are these, why are we even calling them "rules", etc.? The thing is, you imagine that any other realm that exists is just barely similar to ours and it follows "rules" that are just as logical as ours, and thus potentially understandable, and so on. It never even crosses your mind that it is indeed possible that such realms follow a completely different way, and that such "way" may well be indeed beyond any scientific reasoning.
It truly doesn't matter whether we are or aren't capable of comprehending the rules of potential other "realms", or, in case of nested universe, "levels of existence". It doesn't even make a difference whether or not we're capable of understanding the rules of our own observable universe. Being unable to understand something doesn't make it fundamentally impossible to understand.
But what you're saying is pretty close to another description of God that was used in a thread on this very forum years ago - I forgot exactly who it was, but I think they described God as being "outside logic".
It made no sense then and your argument that something could be fundamentally beyond any scientific reasoning makes no more sense now.
Your argument seems to be tied to human ability to perceive reality.
However, no one ever said that humans had a monopoly on practicing the scientific method.
What prevents gods from being scientists?
This is about unintelligibility. We should admit that science might indeed be barred from understanding certain things about the cosmos, and perhaps even definitionally.
Never. Never, never, never ever should we admit that. It's the end of the road for scientific development, and it will never happen in science. If you label something as impossible to know, you are giving up. The answers may never come, but you can not know that.
The whole religious discussion about the divine and the supernatural is of course something much more subtle, more intelligent and rich than the discussion we are having, but going to those more interesting places is just impossible since you just dismiss the whole notions from the outset.
I disagree. Religions are fundamentally uninteresting to me, and claims of supernatural equally so.
What it really has to do is with the Human being, what is special (or not) about us, what is Conscience, what is Free Will (and do we have it or not), what it means to be within a stream of consciousness and how necessary it is (from the logical standpoint) that science outright fails us when we reach this conscience question.
I find those questions discussed from physical standpoint infinitely more interesting than saying that there are spirits, supernaturalness, divine influences or other such goddidit arguments involved.
We do not yet understand how consciousness becomes a thing. However, we have a fairly good idea where to start (hint: it's the brain), and that start is not to say "it's forever beyond our understanding" or invoke the existence of spirits (souls, in this example) to explain something. It is exactly the God of the Gaps argument, with slightly different formulation.
Personally, I'm fairly sure we will start to understand consciousness more as we start engineering conscious entities ourselves - AI's. Ethical or not, we can then actually research on what makes an AI conscious or sentient being, and even if we don't use our own brain structures as a template, it will certainly help on the abstract understanding of what is required for consciousness to form.
karajorma:
The example of a simulation and an Admin entity was discussed some days ago at #hard-light, and there's nothing fundamentally divine about such an Admin entity.
The interesting thing here is that it's a (very strange and particular) example of a nested universe, in which an universe (simulation) exists within a bigger whole. But of course, the actual universe (etymologically, everything-that-exists) includes both the parent and child realms.
At this point, same simple premise can be applied to both the parent and child realms: Everything that exists is, obviously, a natural phenomenon (meaning, it's possible for it to exist in that universe).
For the parent universe, we can make a statement that clearly in that universe, laws of nature allow for running a simulation that is in fact our world. The same laws of nature in that universe also clearly allow for the existence of the Admin entity, and the server infrastructure, and what have you.
This doesn't make the parent universe in any way fundamentally supernatural in my view. And it certainly doesn't make the Admin entity "divine". This, regardless of the level of interaction between the running simulation and admin personnel.
But, of course, nested universes tends to be another iteration of turtle on top of elephants on top of elephants... it's elephants all the way down. And then more elephants. It's a rabbit hole I don't feel particularly inclined to jump in. And particularly a nested simulation type scenario has several issues which are problematic in the view of our current knowledge of physics - such as theory of relativity, particularly the concept of simultaneity and universal reference frame (what kind of in-game coordinate system could produce all the effects of special and general relativity...). On the other hand, some parts of physics are eerily reminiscent of digital computation anomalies (quantum mechanics) and mathematical abstractions like singularities, so who knows.