Quote:
Originally Posted by Boots13
There you go again, being your amazing Geek self ( a most enviable position, I might add) !
I returned home from a weekend at the cabin, marveling at the granite cliffs, snowbound peaks and this space that my heart seems to naturally occupy...and for a nanosecond thought about dimension ! But I know enough to misquote theory and perhaps be dangerous in my assumptions. In other words, I don't know very much at all.
So it all brings me back to your initial point, that being "Why hang onto beliefs for which there is no evidence".
And I cannot help but think the evolution of an idea or theory has advanced technology, it has advanced (depending upon ones viewpoint) civilization.
Intuition has no credible evidence, nor is theory immediately provable so I wonder what is outside science and logic ? And I would ask can intuition or theory without evidence be dis-proven?
But with this approach comes a "double edged sword" . I would add a disclaimer that supporting an 'absolute' theory outside of logic and science has the potential to be a dangerous path.
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Interesting. Well, I have a hypothesis about intuition and what it is. Now, as my starting place let me claim my bias: I look at human beings as evolved animals (because all the evidence points to us being exactly that). Thus not only did evolution give us stereoscopic color-vision (useful for when we were chimp-like animals living in trees) but also gave us our mental facilities. Intuition, I submit to you, is the brain's way of making on-the-spot decisions in the face of imperfect information. To see this, take yourself out of your familiar setting and imagine that you are one of our paleolithic ancestors (homo habilis) eking out a life at the edge of the African savannah. Survival requires you to forage for food across a pretty wide territory some of it out on the open savannah. So there you and your foraging party are, moving across the grassland and you hear a rustling in the grass far off to your right side. Is it a lion, a jackal, or just the wind? If you wait around to find out, it's probably too late to do anything with the information. So you make an *intuitive* leap that it's a lion and respond correctly. Now, here's where evolutionary logic kicks in. (And yes, nature really does work this way) If you run and it turns out you were wrong about it being a threat, you've burned some calories that could've been used for foraging but that's a very small price to pay given that if you didn't run and were wrong that it *wasn't* a lion, then your reproductive fitness would very quickly drop to zero while *greatly* enhancing the lion's fitness (in as much as it gets to eat for another day). Given this nature would favor a system that makes snaps decisions, in the face of imperfect information, even IF there were false positives (determining that there's a lion when there isn't one) over a system that either doesn't make snap decisions (deliberately weighing all options all the time) or one that was more prone to false negatives (determining that there's no lion when there is one). I'd be willing to bet that what we call intuition is a system for making workable-enough decisions on the fly.
As far as your second question that's a bit more of a sticky wicket. In science nothing is ever proven forever. Anything in science--the atomic model, Relativistic Gravity, evolutionary biology, any of it--could be overthrown tomorrow on better information. However, it's very much unlikely to happen because those things I've listed above are very robust (meaning that they have been tested and passed and then tested again in a different area and passed again). The problem with non-evidence based ideas is that there's no way to disprove them.
To give you a contrast, we'll look at a field of study near and dear to my heart; evolutionary biology. I LOVE this theory. I would say it is one of the deepest, most elegant in all of science. Best. Theory. Ever. Hands down. Yet, I could come up with three or four things, off the top of my head, that would definitively demonstrate that evolution through natural selection was false. This isn't the same as saying that it IS false, just that it's possible to set up conditions under which it would be false.
Here they are:
- If there were no means of inheritance, then evolutionary biology wouldn't work since it depends upon offspring being similar, although not identical, to their parents.
- If there were no variation within a population, then evolutionary biology wouldn't work. Natural selection requires that there be variation within a population that is heritable in order for nature to have something to 'favor'.
- If there hadn't been enough time for evolution to work. Evolution is a very slow process. If the Earth were younger than it is by one or two orders of magnitude then there wouldn't be enough time for life as complex as us to evolve.*
- If we found a large number of late-stage mammals (post Dinosaur mammals) in an early stage fossil layer (say pre-Cambrian) then evolutionary biology would be in serious trouble. ONE rabbit fossil in the pre-Cambrian era isn't a problem. Millions of rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian era is a problem since they shouldn't be there.
There are others, of course, but you should get the idea. My question is this: what kind of similar list could one draw up for homeopathy or astrology or what-have-you? Ideally, such a falsification list would be drawn up by those who believe in homeopathy or astrology and then they would go out and seek to find evidence for or against. That's how science works. You explicitly state the problems in your hypothesis or theory and how you have addressed them.
Lastly, because the Universe is a unified whole whatever one purports to be true should fit within that unified whole. By this I mean that, for instance, if your pet hypothesis violates the conversation of mass or conservation of energy or entropy then it's *wrong*, it's not the Universe that has it wrong. (If it isn't wrong then clear off your mantle because if anyone ever proves that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is wrong, that person is guaranteed a Nobel prize) So if your belief is supposed to be some kind of field, it should be subject to the inverse square law because every other field is. If it's based upon an energy then it should, under certain circumstances, behave like a field and there should be some way of detecting it, at least in principle.
Cheers
Aj
*The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. One order of magnitude would be 450 million years old. Two orders of magnitude would be 45 million years old. Three orders of magnitude would be 4.5 million years old. Four orders is 450,000 years. Five orders of magnitude is 45,000 years old. Six orders of magnitude is within the age that Young Earth Creationists believe the Earth to be. Anything more than 1 magnitude off with the age of the Earth and there might be *life* but it would be pretty simple life. Keep in mind that life didn't get started until about 500 million years after the Earth had formed and cooled a bit. Life was then pretty much bacteria until the Cambrian era which was a few billion years later! So the history of life on Earth, in short is first 500 million years, nothing. Then very simple, bacterial and archae life for the next 3.5 billion years. Then the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago and then life becomes var more varied and interesting.