Can science explain everything?

[Karen of Human Resources]

I don't think the question of science is so much "Can it explain everything" but more "can it call out bullshit?"

On a materialistic level yes of course, modern scientific processes are the bst thing we've got, despite being eternally incomplete. I wouldn't even rule out certain questions of philosophy or ethics. Rather awkward things like the IQ curve and human anatomy debunks modern Western dogmas on equality as readily as it debunks a fundamentalist reading of the Genesis narrative.

Science can tell us why physical processes happen; and because ultimately we are meatbags it can also tell us why we feel certain things sometimes too (hormones, instinct etc). It can't always answer purely non tangible questions of meaning or purpose on a micro level (from what I gather findings at the macro level would suggest there is no innate "purpose" to the universe or existence), but it can certainly tell us when we've gone entirely off the rails (e.g "I must sacrifice to the Aztec pantheon otherwise the sun will not rise").

TL;DR: It can explain anything physical and tangible, and it's a fairly good barometer and control for non tangible philosophical/theological questions as well. There isn't a scenario where its entirely irrelevant.

 

[skykiii]

Nobody should believe in dopamine in the way it's commonly understood by midwits. The brain is so much more complicated than "muh chemical imbalance" and all that dumbed-down nonsense invented to sell pills.

And on that note.

Minor PL but I was given painkillers years ago (tramadol in one instance, vicodin in another) and... well, they're part of the reason I question stuff.

I had heard for years that these were addictive and would cause an "escalation" effect where I'm taking more and more just to feel that happiness they gave me initially, but.... that's not what happened. Actually, any time I took more than one tramadol I got sick, so it was an unpleasant experience. There were actually days I completely forgot to take it, as well, so I never experienced the withdrawal effects people describe.

As for vicodin.... I never got a pleasant experience from that at all. And again, never experienced WDs.

And whenever I tell people this, they give me blank looks or even outright accuse me of lying, because apparently these things happen 100% of the time and I'm the first exception in human history.

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

I'd say, yes. I never understood some of my teachers in Catholic school viewed some sciences as a scourge. If God created everything that stands to reason that the scientific discoveries we find were intentional. In that same vain, that also means there is a theoretical end of all discoveries where the unknown is obsolete. Heck, I am starting to believe that what we call Time is actually a particle that we haven't discovered yet. A particle that breaks down our cells at an atomic level and directly forces our cells to repair and adapt. Eventually our body reaches the plateau of senescence and start to decline until the system simply stops. It could be an alternate explanation to the increasing lifespans but at a scale too insignificant to even look at. Entropy leads to evolution and adaptation, it pushes all living life to move forward and reproduce. In addition, the concept of time dilation, something we have observed with astronauts might suggest that this theoretically unknown Time particle may have different properties in a vacuum; sort of like how a photon operates both as a wave and a particle in differing circumstances. Maybe it is our atmosphere that is making this wave to transform into an energized particle while in our atmosphere and return to wave when it exits or if it exits. I know that humanity bases time off of the sun cycles traditionally but now we use atomic clocks to synchronize atomic lab equipment. Perhaps God is a time particle? I sure don't know.

#smokesanotherbowl

 

[Eydallur]

I do not need to find the gene to be able to tell you this thread is cringe.

 

[Vecr]

Probably. But for science to be able to explain everything it would require billions of years and for humanity to be completely incapable of bias. I also feel like it's kind of a reductive question that misses the point of what science is.

I don't think that's true. Even a perfectly unbiased system with perfect rationality and infinite storage and speed can't predict sequences that 1) can't be predicted usefully and 2) it doesn't have enough information about. The theoretical optimum is moving about half of the probability mass for each bit you receive, and even that's not achievable while being subject to the laws of physics.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

I don't think that's true. Even a perfectly unbiased system with perfect rationality and infinite storage and speed can't predict sequences that 1) can't be predicted usefully and 2) it doesn't have enough information about. The theoretical optimum is moving about half of the probability mass for each bit you receive, and even that's not achievable while being subject to the laws of physics.

Ok so, can you point to where causality is actually broken, or is this “muh Heisenberg” again

 

[Vecr]

Ok so, can you point to where causality is actually broken, or is this “muh Heisenberg” again

No, I'm assuming a DAG and no faster than light travel. The latter is actually a problem, because based on the light cones there are major regions that can't send information to you, and major regions where you can't send information to. As well as regions you can't get information from or to at all.

 

[shameful existence]

We probably have no idea of all the limitations of our science. There is no guarantee that whatever laws of nature we have discovered so far will still be there tomorrow. Any day, we may wake up to a world we don't recognize.

Like in the chicken and a farmer analogy. The chicken is fed each morning by a farmer. It happens every day of its life, so the chicken thinks it's a law. Until one morning, when the chicken gets slaughtered.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

No. Science is limited, it's merely human understanding, and to think that's absolute is sheer hubris. God created a vast and intricate world we only have a vague understanding of.

Even from an Atheistic perspective we're just conscious meat, if anything exists outside of our measly five senses then we're absolutely, hopelessly blind to it, and we'll never know.

 

[N Space]

If you include math or computer science within 'science' then the answer is positively no thanks to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and the Halting Problem. Phrased in a way that answers the OP, in general we can't explain (and never will) if a program doesn't halt because we haven't waited long enough for it to halt or if it'll never halt. If you want to learn why that is, watch the annexed video, IMO it's quite straightforward:

My problem with that is nobody can prove randomness even exists. We can’t program a computer to make a random number. Dice rolls and coin flips are just physics problems that resolve themselves faster than we can process.

I believe that is not possible but I need to explain a few things first:

1. Mathematically speaking 'randomness' isn't something that exists, the definition of a random variable has nothing to do with being 'predictable' nor 'random' and in fact numbers are random variables (these are called degenerate random variables in the context of probability).

2. 'Random' is an adjective to describe something which you can't predict with the knowledge at hand, for example, when you play poker the hand you receive is random from your perspective because you can't predict what it'll be before you receive it, however, if you shuffle the deck of cards using a PRNG (which is the case if you play online) and know the seed beforehand, you can predict all the players hands and from your perspective they are no longer random.

3. That being said, I think a good definition for something to be truly random is that it's impossible to predict regardless of your knowledge.

4. With the aforementioned comment, I think it's impossible to empirically tell if something is truly random or not because you'll never have all possible knowledge to tell if you can or can't predict the outcome. What you can do in principle is to tell if something isn't truly random since that implies there's some amount of knowledge that'll yield a prediction.

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

Science can't explain why I can't get a girlfriend, despite being so handsome and funny.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Science can't explain why I can't get a girlfriend, despite being so handsome and funny.

Lack of adequate sexy man pheromones.

 

[Vecr]

The thing that bothers me about it is the non-theistic model insists that everything just RANDOMLY organized itself into meaningful shapes.

My problem with that is nobody can prove randomness even exists. We can’t program a computer to make a random number. Dice rolls and coin flips are just physics problems that resolve themselves faster than we can process.

Then when I say that, someone comes by with “hurr durr Heisenberg” and I’m like ok but

The limits of science aren't a reason to give up.

 

[Otterly]

Nobody should believe in dopamine in the way it's commonly understood by midwits. The brain is so much more complicated than "muh chemical imbalance" and all that dumbed-down nonsense invented to sell pills.

Muh chemical imbalance has, thankfully, started to be trashed. Here’s a fun story; when they invented Prozac they wanted to sell it in Japan. But Japan had no concept of depression as an illness, but rather it was a complex cultural and personal issue. So they invented a marketing campaign and called depression’a cold of the soul’ and sold Prozac to the Japanese

Actually, any time I took more than one tramadol I got sick, so it was an unpleasant experience.

Similar here. Had the misfortune to be injured a couple of times and given opiates. Made me feel horribly sick, refused them as soon as I was able to, which was a few doses. Benzos have had similar experiments. I don’t doubt they’re powerfully addictive for some, but this isn’t universal

Spells. People are under spells. Sorcery. Magic.

This is from the other thread but it’s struck me recently how you can view a lot of the. Current year woes just as well through a religious or supernatural type lens as you can through a scientific one and it’s just describing the same thing in different language. you can consider the Troon plague as a mind virus, a cultural contagion event, or wrote dry papers about ROGD and peer pressure and grooming or you can see it as a bunch of demons. One might sound a bit whacky if you’re not religious but it’s describing the same phenomenon.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

I believe that is not possible but I need to explain a few things first:

You don’t need to explain those things, I understand them.

So you believe in the concept of “random” as a placeholder to use for something too complicated for us to parse, essentially. And yeah, that’s what I think it is, too. But I say that to denigrate the concept of randomness, because it’s absolutely ridiculous to use that to discredit causality, which is something big brained people with letters after their names do constantly.

The atheist interpretation of a big bang sans intelligent design relies on big-R “Randomness” is place of a design. That means this randomness, that doesn’t actually exist except as an assignation to problems we’re too lazy to solve, is credited with the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravitation and electromagnetism making meaningful shapes that act with SYSTEMS like evolution and thermodynamics out of what would otherwise have been subatomic dust in nothing.

But ok, explain it to me. Explain how “we don’t have enough information” disproves causality and disproves intelligent design. Those are separate issues, by the way.

Adding that “lack of information” doesn’t break causality because the information we don’t have could show causation. If everything has to have a cause, then the Big Bang doesn’t explain away creation, it’s a description of creation and we all still don’t have enough information to know what initially existed before existence existed. I call it god, though. Whatever

 

[Otterly]

Ive seen a few articles lately about the world being a simulation. I don’t really understand the rationale the article used, I’m not a physicist and it’s out of my league. But what struck me was again the absolute lack of any kind of introspection. So you think you’ve got proof the world is a simulation? But no discussion of the fact this is effectively saying it was created and thus must have a creator?

 

[SpergioLeonne]

Ive seen a few articles lately about the world being a simulation. I don’t really understand the rationale the article used, I’m not a physicist and it’s out of my league. But what struck me was again the absolute lack of any kind of introspection. So you think you’ve got proof the world is a simulation? But no discussion of the fact this is effectively saying it was created and thus must have a creator?

Yeah, the reality is that the popular level of science exemplified by Michio Kaku and Neil Degrasse Tyson justifies itself like the rest of progressivism: “we don’t need to be accurate, it’s we’re sTaRtInG a CoNvErSaTiOn”.

Simulation theory is legitimately just taking the movie “the matrix” and saying “omg it’s real” by listing every sort of paranormal event in pop culture and attributing it to The Simulation

I hate it

If someone actually listed equations, I haven’t seen them. If they haven’t, it’s as serious as I stated above

 

[Fek]

or you can see it as a bunch of demons

I find it helps in bridging the gap between all the aforementioned concepts to try for a scale or spectrum with one end labeled "service to self", and the other labeled "service to others". Is this scientific concept serving humanity as a whole, or is it a ploy to get ahead personally in some fashion? Is this religion seeking to free/encourage others, or hold them in crippling shame? Etc. Obviously, one scientist working on a particular invention or concept may view it selfishly while a colleague in the same field views it through a lens of altruism. Such is the choice of the individual.

More to the greater point of your thread: I believe any system utilized which sets out under a genuine desire to see humanity achieve its highest potential will allow for most (not quite all) questions to find answers. Science can be that system just as readily as it can become a great downfall. The system isn't as important as those who use it, and their intentions/beliefs in doing so.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

Can science explain everything? Are there things it can’t explain, and if so why?

Even if science can explain everything, we can't understand everything. Most comprehension beyond the human scale has to be filtered through technological/mathematical interpretation and is thus potentially subject to error and false premises. Even if that wasn't the case, the human mind can only hold so much: you see a version of this today in education, where people pursue their interests prioritize them. Mathematicians think math is most important, economists are convinced that economics drives human behavior, and black studies majors are convinced they wuz kangz.

 

[Karen of Human Resources]

This is from the other thread but it’s struck me recently how you can view a lot of the. Current year woes just as well through a religious or supernatural type lens as you can through a scientific one and it’s just describing the same thing in different language. you can consider the Troon plague as a mind virus, a cultural contagion event, or wrote dry papers about ROGD and peer pressure and grooming or you can see it as a bunch of demons. One might sound a bit whacky if you’re not religious but it’s describing the same phenomenon.

There is one core difference though.

The scientific perspective may not know what the cause is, but it can correctly applied propose several theories and start to narrow down the possibilities. It might never find it, but there is openess to realistic possibilities.

The theistic perspective declares absolute revealed infallible knowledge from the start. There is the potential that this guess may be correct, but the success rate is rather low. The theistic perspective does not entertain other theories, and suppresses them in both peaceful and violent ways.

One has the potential to accurately define a phenomenon. The other has one shot and traditionally when talking about material phenomena, has always been wrong.

They may both talk about the same phenomena; but one has the potential to understand. The other can never understand.