Philosophy of Science Facebook group – Nature of science

Philosophy of Science Facebook group Alessandro Carvalho shared a link

[ 25/May/21 ]

All 6 answers are clearly wrong.

Science, at its best, is an eternal enquiry into the nature of being that uses a process of refining all elements of experimental design, performance, evaluation and interpretation to determine which of the available interpretive schema is most likely to account for all observations in the most parsimonious way possible.

And reality often has the unsettling characteristic of demanding responses to complex issues in very short times, so we all have many subconscious processes to simplify down reality under stress to produce rapid responses. This is often antithetical to science.

Thus science is a process of starting from a set of assumptions, and progressively become less wrong over time; as contexts allow.

When you do the numbers on the evidence sets currently available as to what seems (as a minimum) to be present in reality, and in the sets of possible interpretive schema available, then it seems entirely possible that there is sufficient complexity and uncertainty present that the process could be continued indefinitely.

It seems that we all get born with various sets of biases instantiated in our sensory and neural systems by the evolutionary processes of the last 4 billion years that we have strong tendencies to form certain classes of understandings and models in the first instance. Becoming as aware as possible of the many classes and instances of such biases is an essential step towards being able to see the infinities that seem very probably to exist beyond them.

Developing an ability to be comfortable with such fundamental uncertainty is very difficult for most human brains. The strong biases towards simple binary resolutions tend to make stepping beyond binary logic into the infinite realm of all possible logics and all possible sets of truth values too much for most. Thus what most are able to conceive of as science is a very simplistic model of what science actually is at its best.