Re: Bothered by "falsification" criteria for scence

>
> You miss the simple fact that science is simply what scientists do. It
> is just a means of learning things about nature. Falsifiability isn't
> so much a requirement of science as it is a consequence of what
> scientists need to do to accomplish anything. What is required is that
> scientists be able to verify what they think that they know about
> nature. Verifications takes many forms, but unless you have some means
> of verification you will never know if your notion could be true or
> not. AP can't be verified to any extent worth considering. The
> simplest way to understand what the cut off is, is to ask what is it
> about our knowledge of nature that we lose if we throw out the
> antrhopic principle.


We may miss out on the *correct* answer. It is that simple. It is
perfectly possible that our universe has been "tuned" for complex life
via anthropic selection. (If a better testable explanation seems a
better candidate, so be it, but we are not there yet.)

Like I said in the opening, you are making science sound like the joke
about looking for your lost watch where the light is instead of the
area where you may have actually lost it.


> The answer is nothing. Not a single experimental
> method has to change. We will not lose anything out of the textbooks.
> This is simply due to the fact that we can't study AP in a meaningful
> enough manner to know if it is even wrong, let alone, whether it could
> be correct.
>
> The same thing is wrong with the standard ID speel. If not a single
> way we study nature has to change if we leave it out, why put it in?
> It might be true, but you can't tell and it doesn't matter whether it
> is true or not for the purposes of the scientific endeavor.
>
> It is just crappy philosophical bull*** to claim that something might
> be true so it should be given equal weight to the things that we have
> determined are true to the limits of the scientific methodology. No
> one can stop anyone from exploring various notions, but you can't get
> upset if your notions don't come up to snuff, or you can't bring it to
> a level where science can evaluate it. There is an infinite subset of
> things that might be true, but are not true, and in a finite universe
> there should be a finite set of things that are true, so what should
> the cut off be?
>
> If things like vitalism, AP, and ID were part of our scientific
> investigation of nature we would know it by what would be lost if we
> removed them from the picture of nature that we have put together, so
> far. They could be true, but what does it matter, how would you know?
>
> Ron Okimoto

I find it odd you put AP in the same category as vitalism. Vitalism is
poorly-defined, but multiple universes of AP are simply "more of the
same" of what we can observe, but with different constants. It is a
very small leap, mostly just an increase in quantity.

As stated elsewhere, we can apply techniques such as Occum's Razor to
unobservable explanations. Thus, we don't necessarily have to deal with
every possible non-testable explanation.

Nor am I suggesting we give them equal weight. The issue is whether
they are part of science, not whether they are the top scorer in
science. I perfectly agree that they should be scored low on the
explanation candidate scale.

-T-

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