Comment on science never ends

• hihi24522@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This is false. Godels incompleteness theorems only prove that there will be things that are unprovable in that body of models.

  Good news, Newtons flaming laser sword says that if something can’t be proven, it isn’t worth thinking about.

  Imagine I said, “we live in a simulation but it is so perfect that we’ll never be able to find evidence of it”

  Can you prove my statement? No.

  In fact no matter what proof you try to use I can just claim it is part of the simulation. All models will be incomplete because I can always say you can’t prove me wrong. But, because there is never any evidence, the fact we live in a simulation must never be relevant/required for the explanation of things going on inside our models.

  Are models are “incomplete” already, but it doesn’t matter and it won’t because anything that has an effect can be measured/catalogued and addded to a model, and anything that doesn’t have an effect doesn’t matter.

  TL;DR: Science as a body of models will never be able to prove/disprove every possible statement/hypothesis, but that does not mean it can’t prove/disprove every hypothesis/statement that actually matters.

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  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Godel is a mathematical result, not a scientific result. It only applies to science to the extent that it depends on mathematics.

    we live in a simulation but it is so perfect that we’ll never be able to find evidence of it

    This is not a mathematical statement and thus it’s irrelevant to Godel’s theorem.

    Newtons flaming laser sword says that if something can’t be proven, it isn’t worth thinking about.

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    • hihi24522@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Gödel’s theorem is a logical proof about any axiomatic system within which multiplication and division are defined.

      By nature, every scientific model that uses basic arithmetic relies on those kinds axioms and is therefore incomplete.

      Furthermore, the statement “we live in a simulation” is a logical statement with a truth value. Thus it is within the realm of first order logic, part of mathematics.

      The reason you cannot prove the statement is because it itself is standalone. The statement tells you nothing about the universe, so you cannot construct any implication that can be proven directly, or by contradiction, or by proving the converse etc.

      As for the latter half of your comment, I don’t think I’m the one who hasn’t thought about this enough.

      You are the one repeating the line that “science doesn’t prove things” without realizing that is a generalization not an absolute statement. It also largely depends on what you call science.

      Many people say that science doesn’t prove things, it disproves things. Technically both are mathematic proof. In fact, the scientific method is simply proving an implication wrong.

      You form a hypothesis to test which is actually an implication “if (assumptions hold true), then (hypothesis holds true).” If your hypothesis is not true then it means your assumptions (your model) are not correct.

      However, you can prove things directly in science very easily: Say you have a cat in a box and you think it might be dead. You open the box and it isn’t dead. You now have proven that the cat was not dead. You collected evidence and reached a true conclusion and your limited model of the world with regards to the cat is proven correct. QED.

      Say you have two clear crystals in front of you and you know one is quartz and one is calcite but you don’t remember which. But you have vinegar with you and you remember that it should cause a reaction with only the calcite. You place a drop of vinegar on the rocks and one starts fizzing slightly. Viola, you have just directly proven that rock is the calcite.

      Now you can only do this kind of proof when your axioms (that one rock is calcite, one rock is quartz, and only the calcite will react with the vinegar) hold true.

      The quest of science, of philosophy, is to find axioms that hold true enough we can do these proofs to predict and manipulate the world around us.

      Just like in mathematics, there are often multiple different sets of axioms that can explain the same things. It doesn’t matter if you have “the right ones” You only need ones that are not wrong in your use case, and that are useful for whatever you want to prove things with.

      The laws of thermodynamics have not been proven. They have been proven statistically but I get the feeling that you wouldn’t count statistics as a valid form of proof.

      Fortunately, engineers don’t care what you think, and with those laws as axioms, engineers have proven that there cannot be any perpetual motion machines. Furthermore, Carnot was able to prove that there is a maximum efficiency heat engine and he was able to derive the processes needed to create one.

      All inventions typically start as proof based on axioms found by science. And often times, science proves a model wrong by trying to do something, assuming the model was right, and then failing.

      The point is that if our scientific axioms weren’t true, we would not be able to build things with them. We would not predict the world accurately. (Notice that statement is an implication) When this happens, (when that implication is proven false) science finds the assumption/axiom in our model that was proven wrong and replaces it with one or more assumptions that are more correct.

      Science is a single massive logical proof by process of elimination.

      The only arguments I’ve ever seen that it isn’t real proof are in the same vein as the “you can’t prove the world isn’t a simulation.” Yep, it’s impossible to be 100% certain that all of science is correct. However, that doesn’t matter.

      It is absolutely possible to know/prove if science dealing with a limited scope is a valid model because if it isn’t, you’ll be able to prove it wrong. “Oh but there could be multiple explanations” yep, the same thing happens in mathematics.

      You can usually find multiple sets of axioms that prove the same things. Some of them might allow you to prove more than the others. Maybe they even disagree on certain kinds of statements. But if you are dealing with statements in that zone of disagreement, you can prove which set of axioms is wrong, and if you don’t deal with those statements at all, then both are equally valid models.

      Science can never prove that only a single model is correct… because it is certain that you can construct multiple models that will be equally correct. The perfect model doesn’t matter because it doesn’t exist. What matters is what models/axioms are true enough that they can be useful, and science is proving what that is and isn’t.

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  • lectricleopard@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Having things be unprovable in a body of models would make it not a 100% correct body of models. You know it’d be… incomplete. That’s what it means, we’ve mathematically proven you cannot prove everything that is true.

    NFLS is about whether a particular claim is testable, and can therefore productively be debated (as in I’m not debating whether there is a teapot orbiting earth). The way you’ve attempted to combine these two ideas is odd.

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    • hihi24522@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Sorry, the point I was trying to make is that we will be able to know if any statement that is testable is correct.

      I just wanted to clarify that your initial comment is only true when you are counting things that don’t actually matter in science. Anything that actually matters can be tested/proven which means that science can be 100% correct for anything that’s actually relevant.

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  • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    We haven’t yet been able to ressurect anything by recreating vital signs in a corpse so there’s something we can’t measure or detect of life so far.

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    • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I’d argue that we can’t do a resurrection because that’s really complex, not because we don’t know how.

      I’ll also point out that there are people alive today who were declared medically dead that live normal lives because we made their heart beat again.

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      • Quadhammer@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        The brain is a hard drive with only one working flash of the system

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      • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yes, and those are rare cases and so far apart from “corrolates with time” it is hard to impossible to know for sure when someone is outside that window.

        I was also under the illusion that we’d done a lot of experiments trying to reelecrifiy frogs’ brains we have failed to get anywhere beyond muscle spasms off of the data and measurements we’ve been able to make.

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    • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      For me the more important implication of Godel is that mathematics is itself countable and thus measure zero. No matter how much we do, the infinite majority of the unknown will still be left to explore… And that’s just the math, not even talking about the models based on it (also measure zero).

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      • Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        You know a lot more Maths than I do, and I agree with you (even if my thoughts in it all are more about having a fancy name to get people who claim both Positivism and “Maybe it’s all a simulation man” to recognise the hypocrisy of that).

        My whole life-data-mismatch thing is from similar discussions with positivists, as I think life and consciousness is a pretty easy area to show that it doesn’t hold all the answers.

        Back to the main point:
        The idea that Maths is countable is pretty wild, and I’m gonna need to mull on it. Thanks for sharing.

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