Can science explain everything?

[Otterly]

To avoid derailing the thread on pre Christian views of magic any more.
Can science explain everything? Are there things it can’t explain, and if so why?
Also to discuss the philosophy of science. And how we know what we know.

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

I think it can explain everything in the physical world. As for whether it will, for us at least, I think not, as the physical world is infinite. Philosophical and spiritual things can't be explained by science. They're every bit as real, but they do not exist physically.

 

[Divine right to rule]

Are we talking hard sciences?
No.
There are several hurdles of understanding.
First, is our own meat-hardware, our intelligence is not limitless, even with tools like math.
Quantum mechanics has several hurdles of total understanding, the most famous one is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, that one is almost a hundred years old.
From the minimum to the maximum, only a tiny part of information in the universe can even reach earth, there is a hard limit of our macroscopic view of the universe aslong as we are limited to earth.

We try to understand and explain as much as we can, but science is a process undertaken by humans and our creations, and we are per definition limited.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

The limits of science depend how you define science.

Does it mean the study of physical things? Does it mean the study of things that are part of nature that may not be strictly physical? Such as numbers, or some views of consciousness. Does it mean acquiring knowledge through strictly controlled and testable hypotheses, even perhaps of non-physical things like ghosts?

In all cases, the answer is no, just in different ways.

If science is strictly the study of physical things, then it can't possibly comment on any non-physical things. It can't even comment whether non-physical things exist. Science has to remain agnostic on things like souls or gods. The farthest it could ever go is to say "so far as we know, the physical universe is a closed system". And if that statement ever proved to be false, it's debatable if science as a discipline would even be capable of acknowledging it. Science might carry on as if it never happened. Science as the study of physical things has to assume that only physical things exist, or it doesn't work anymore.

Science sometimes tries to pull other things under the umbrella of "nature" that aren't exactly physical, like numbers or certain concepts of consciousness. But I don't know what that would mean exactly. Seems to me that a thing is either physical, or it isn't. If a physicalist model can't account for everything, then it's either limited, or wrong.

Finally would be the version of the scientific method that openly claims non-physical things are open to scientific testing through hypothesis and experiment. You see this with claims that religion is a failed hypothesis, or trying to prove certain forms of morality through science, or disproving ghosts. I'm not sure what to make of this. Seems to me like whatever territory you're in at that point, it isn't exactly science in that sense. And anyway, there are plenty of "scientific" beliefs that aren't directly observable. Lots of things in astronomy, for example, are inferences based on other things. Like the effects of gravity and theoretical models. They can't exactly be isolated in a lab. Are those science? Well...

In any case science requires certain assumptions. It requires you to trust in human reasoning. It requires you to trust your senses. It requires you to believe that the universe is orderly and intelligible. Those aren't unreasonable assumptions, but science can't bootstrap itself into proving them.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

I think it can explain everything in the physical world.

Even from an entirely materialist point of view, there could hypothetically be anomalous one-off events that defy the laws of physics taking place around us all the time and science would have little to say on the matter because there's a presumption of permanent, universal rules that work every single time. Even in the realm of quantum probabilities, there are still hard and fast rules governing those probabilities.

You can't really do science on something that only ever happens once and is totally unpredictable.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

I wonder if entropy just kind of exists at a rate that keeps everything as a moving target, like so no unified theory can perfectly encompass this or that aspect of the universe as we’re trying to define it, because it changed while we were crunching numbers.

 

[Lone MacReady II]

Doubt it, considering #Science can't even come up with its own creation myth.

Semites: In the beginning there was darkness, and then God created light.
Science: In the beginning there was darkness, and then Bang created light.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

Science is just organized observation, in a way; if it cannot be observed either directly or indirectly it cannot be known.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, that one is almost a hundred years old.

I made you a meme

 

[TEA 3HF]

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

So I have a question regarding this line of thought. Do you mean in the context of the Scientific Method and its approach to how information is observed, documented, discussed and debated on a specific methodology? Or do you mean more broadly the discipline of observing physical phenomenon, regardless of the exact methodology?

In terms of the Scientific Method, it is pretty close to being able to but I would argue it has a major imperfection. It relies on our capability to observe phenomena and to do so reproducibly. This can cover a LOT of what is out there but I am skeptical it is possible to cover everything going on. Various examples include how psychology and psychiatry can observe the after effects of phenomena involving human thought, but it is *currently* impossible to observe the human thought process in a direct and reproducible manner. One could also postulate that the very principles we hold to be the LAWS of physics could only be true in the framework of where we currently are in the universe as we can observe it. There is the possibility that there are places and times where these laws do not hold, and we might not be able to observe them directly, only their aftereffects.

Per the second part of my question, maybe on another framework there are principles and phenomena that could be observed and perhaps even proven. That said once you get further removed from the observability requirement that limits the scientific method, it can then immediately be argued thqt you get further away from Science itself. This then is not necessarily an academic drawback. Mathematics, which is basically the language in which science is written, is further developed less by direct observation of physical phenomena, and more in the realm of discussion, debate, and abstract observation and reproducibility.


It's an interesting, but supremely complicated question.

 

[SentinentCloud]

it cannot explain why are K-pop enthusiasts not being removed of existence by natural selection

 

[Conspiracy Mawile]

Are theory-of-everything supporters just positivists in denial?

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Theoretically yes. Practically no.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

Doubt it, considering #Science can't even come up with its own creation myth.

Semites: In the beginning there was darkness, and then God created light.
Science: In the beginning there was darkness, and then Bang created light.

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

I made you a meme View attachment 5753189

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Are theory-of-everything supporters just positivists in denial?

No. There's nothing inherently contradictory about a unified field theory AND believing in Haitian voodoo or whatever.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

Science can't explain anything, that's why the definitions are always changing.

Science is, at best, a cope.

 

[skykiii]

I was asking questions like this awhile back. Since then... well my distrust of science has only grown.

Like, for me I believe anything that I can prove myself. But when they start talking about small orbs you can only see with special machines that cost millions of dollars and only two exist in the whole world.... yeah, no, that smells snake oil to me.

Another thing I've come to distrust is what seems like the "philosophy" of science.

Like.... there is no way to discuss evolution or pheromones or dopamine without basically saying we're all just glorified robots and that nothing we do matters, so we might as well all be hedonistic. Which is a depressing message for some but awfully convenient for others, especially in a society that actually requires hedonistic spending to function.

I don't even believe in Dopamine anymore.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

I don't even believe in Dopamine anymore.

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.

 

[Mewtwo_Rain]

No. Let's say someone could for say mind read. If other people could not provably show case this ability to an scientific audience visibly then such a thing could not be proven. Even if someone was prophetic and got every prediction right as it could be a game of chance instead of prophecy since you can't show how you predicted or something similar. Anything that could be effecting a metric of existence that is more complex or impossible to visibly prove or showcase would also not be able to be proven by science due to how science legitimizes its proofs.

Or even take simple errors or oddities in nature we can not explain why they happen, even with obvious proof they do sometimes happen it can't be concretely explained. It doesn't also help some events or mechanics of existence can't easily be observed and some may not be viewable in any meaningful way in the first place.

This also applies to scientific theories some can not be actually proven even if we try to observe something that should be easily provable because it would require a controlled environment for some deductions of said hypothesis we can even see an event a handful of times to claim the observation of such an error/event/etc. real but we can not easily replicate it to the point of being accepted as scientific fact.

 

[Tablet County]

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.

Science is just a method. I'd argue that even the earliest humans were practicing "science" in the sense that they recognized that rubbing two sticks together makes fire and that these red berries make you swell up and shit yourself to death while these purple ones are fine and make headaches feel better.

There are only two types of people who believe science is anything more than a name given to our ability to understand the world around us; the first are religious fundamentalists who see everything through the lens of dogma and so perceive science as another competing religion. The other type are pseudointellectual cargo cultists who see science as a magic button to press that makes them look smarter, who lend credence to the idea of science as religion.