Problem with the arguments

[Andara Bledin]

I really doubt we know as much (as a percentage of all that is knowable) as we think we do.

Not so much because we don't know scary amounts of information so much as the limits some people put on what we can know are set rather lower than they are likely to turn out to be.

[Gravekeeper]

I really doubt we know as much (as a percentage of all that is knowable) as we think we do.

We certainly do not know everything, but at the same time saying we don't know anything is rather inaccurate at this point. What we do know is rather astounding.

Not so much because we don't know scary amounts of information so much as the limits some people put on what we can know are set rather lower than they are likely to turn out to be.

That's kind of what I'm getting at. I typically find that anyone who sets a limit on what we can or currently do know, doesn't realize exactly how much we as a species actually do know. We know some pretty Crazy Shit(tm) at this point and the even crazier shit already exists in legitimate theory just waiting for technology to catch up.

I mean, the reason we know the size and structure of the visible universe is because, well, we can see it. The left over warmth from the big bang is still there. Space is only black to the visible spectrum. You turn a radio telescope on it and that seemingly empty black background is actually completely full of thermal energy.

Funny thing about the universe is that Earth is bombarded from all sides by ridiculous amounts of information about it that allows us to learn ridiculous things without ever having to leave our planet. With each new step our technology takes, we uncover another layer of this information.

I mean look at us now. We're detecting planets around other stars every week. The guy that came up with the method we use to detect planets was considered out there by the rest of the astronomy community too. He was ostracized for years for promoting his theory until technology reached the point it could test his theory, and then everyone was kind of like "Well. Shit.". ;p

[crashhelmet]

Funny thing about the universe is that Earth is bombarded from all sides by ridiculous amounts of information about it that allows us to learn ridiculous things without ever having to leave our planet. With each new step our technology takes, we uncover another layer of this information

I mean look at us now. We're detecting planets around other stars every week. The guy that came up with the method we use to detect planets was considered out there by the rest of the astronomy community too. He was ostracized for years for promoting his theory until technology reached the point it could test his theory, and then everyone was kind of like "Well. Shit.". ;p

This is part of my beef with the scientific community. Not only does it let us learn more about the universe, it sometimes proves wrong "facts" that we were taught to believe for years and ostracized and ridiculed if we thought differently.

Dr. Erik Verlinde, a respected String Theorist and Physics professor, is no longer as respected as he once was because of his belief that gravity doesn't exist. He believes it's more of an Entropic force and that what we believe to be the laws of "gravity" is actually the laws of thermodynamics.

Article from NY Times

As a skydiver and someone who's witnessed birds, insects, mammals and aircraft flying, I tend to believe his theories.

[Gravekeeper]

As a skydiver and someone who's witnessed birds, insects, mammals and aircraft flying, I tend to believe his theories.

Not to rain on your parade, but he himself says he didn't have a working theory there, just a idea. He also has in no way lost any respect from his peers or been ostracized in any way at all. Seeing as he was awarded some odd 4 million dollar research grant to explore this new perspective on gravity he wrote about. -.-

I would hardly call winning an award and several million in research funding losing the respect of your peers over your supposedly crazy new idea.

[Mytical]

I believe what the point was GK, is that sometimes people have crazy ideas, that don't seem so crazy later..and that sometimes something is taken as fact turns out to be hogwash.

As the Men in Black put it (paraphrasing) A long time ago we KNEW the earth was flat, we KNEW that the universe rotated around the earth. We KNEW that we were alone..imagine what we will know tomorrow.

Which is also my point. Right now we KNOW such and such..and there might come a time in the future that we look back and laugh at how foolish we really were to think we knew anything.

Now that doesn't mean we should stop searching, or stop learning, but we must understand that if we go in with ANY perceived notion, we can skew the results. Just because every test we run on something points to one fact, doesn't mean that in the future we might take a look at it in a different way, with new technology, that will prove that the other tests were flawed because it used what we 'knew'.

TL;DR Version. I assume you are familiar with GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out)? We can get all the data we could ever hope to get, but if our understanding of it is wrong, then the only data that we can put out would be wrong also. However! As it is all we have right now, I am not advocating throwing it out, because it IS all we got. Just that we have to make sure that we understand that we understand so little.

[Gravekeeper]

I believe what the point was GK, is that sometimes people have crazy ideas, that don't seem so crazy later..and that sometimes something is taken as fact turns out to be hogwash.

I get the point, that's just not even remotely what happened in the example is all. >.>

Which is also my point. Right now we KNOW such and such..and there might come a time in the future that we look back and laugh at how foolish we really were to think we knew anything.

Moments like that are fewer and far between now. You're not going to get any truly stupid ones like flat Earth anymore me thinks. Mainly because our methods have evolved into the scientific process. We no longer just make shit up to explain something we don't know or can't figure out.

Challenging the idea of gravity for example isn't new. There are a few alternative theories for gravity. But when it comes to competing theories, science will go with the one that has the largest body of evidence until such a time as it is disproved or another theory has a greater body of evidence.

You can no longer stare out at the sea and go "Welp, looks flat to me" and have anyone accept that. You need to prove its flat.

Thats why the atheism vs theism argument gets so rocky in public circles. The atheist viewpoint will inevitable invoke the scientific method to support its side, while the theist viewpoint will attempt to shoehorn theism into what they claim are the unknown gaps.

The reason it looks so ridiculous to the outside observer is because the unknown gap being used often IS known, the person using the argument just isn't versed enough in science to know it. Or they confuse the word theory with the idea of a scientific theory. Hence the evolution is "just a theory" argument that morons in political office seem to like.

I'm not trying to harp on one side. Its just that 90% of the public arguments I see of atheism vs theism in the west ends up boiling down to arguing the scientific method with people that have no grasp of science and hold up their ignorance as proof of their position.

IE. If you have no fucking idea how magnets work, you're going to make an ass of yourself arguing that they're magic.

Just because every test we run on something points to one fact, doesn't mean that in the future we might take a look at it in a different way, with new technology, that will prove that the other tests were flawed because it used what we 'knew'.

The scientific community is well aware of this these days. Thats why you don't see anyone rushing to huge proclamations or breakthroughs anymore. When you see "breakthrough" on the news its always from a group that was working on that breakthrough for months to years before finalizing their conclusions and having them peer reviewed before going public.

A respectable member of the scientific community doesn't want to end up being the guy we all point and laugh at 50 years later ( Or 2 weeks later in some cases >.> ). Hence really out there bat shit theories with no supporting evidence are often only discussed on various new age and conspiracy websites.

Even when we make new discoveries now, 9 times of 10 we already had 1-2 working theories that pointed that pointed discovery that were just waiting for verification. The God particle being the most famous recent example. The God particle was the dark matter of quantum mechanics. We knew it had to be there based on the shape of the hole in the puzzle.

We are technologically past the point of making any hugely stupid scientific proclamations that will bite us in the ass. Unless something completely out of left field arises like the universe being a Matrix like simulation. However, we already have a working theory of that too and there's even a group of scientists that have devised a test to discover if its true which they are currently running. >.>

But that's kind of unlikely, because in order for something like that to occur there has to be a massive glitch in the rules of the game. If you don't know how to play hockey, you can start to learn it if you watch it long enough. But it would go against all logic for you to figure out 90% of the rule book only to have the players start playing with a soccer ball for no apparent reason.

Its rare for there to be a scientific discovery that really catches us out of left field anymore. Because someone, somewhere has likely already written a paper about that exact scenario. Especially in our current age of rapid, if remote, space exploration. We discover fun new shit in space every week, so we've learned to be open minded differing theories as to what we'll see next.

[Mytical]

*nods* What I am saying, however, is that our universal standards..might not be so universal after all. There might be, for all we know a section of space that throws out all 'our' rules and laughs at them. Gravity could be reverse, or non existent, etc. Just because we can not yet see it, does not make it not exist. For a long time nobody could see air molecules, doesn't mean air didn't exist.

So even if it was a tiny percent of the universe that did not follow 'our' rules, that could throw off all our calculations by so much it would be hilarious. Again, I don't advocate starting from scratch, because it IS all we have, but that we don't know near as much as some would believe. The information we have, we have only our perspective of it. Our perspective is by its very nature changing the outcome. Even when we try to forget and not skew the results, we can't until something unexpected happens. The rules in our sandbox, might not be even close to those in other sandboxes.

We have come to a crossroads however. One where I must excuse myself. Not because I think that there is no point in me trying to convince you, but that I do not think there is anything said that would convince me. Which is not fair to you. I question everything, even questioning why I question. If there comes a point I think that I am becoming a wall, I remove myself from the path, so others can maybe make some progression.

[Andara Bledin]

While I don't think there's much to our universe that is going to really throw a paradigm shift at us, I do belive that our universe is actually a much smaller piece of the pie that is everything than we tend to think it is.

[Gravekeeper]

*nods* What I am saying, however, is that our universal standards..might not be so universal after all. There might be, for all we know a section of space that throws out all 'our' rules and laughs at them. Gravity could be reverse, or non existent, etc. Just because we can not yet see it, does not make it not exist. For a long time nobody could see air molecules, doesn't mean air didn't exist.

But see, there are sections of space that throw out all of our rules and laugh at them, in fact most of space does it to some degree. Space is constantly bending the rules we thought were set 50-100 years ago. Thats kind of what I'm getting at here. The scientific community is prepared for a lot of different scenarios that sound pretty crazy at first glance. Our working body of knowledge is rather malleable, because it has to be based on what we've learned from space and about the universe in the last 20 years or so.

There can very well be other universes that have all sorts of crazy shit going on, in fact we've already discovered the potential points where our universe literally gives way to someone else's universe. And who knows what goes on in their backyard. We can't see over the fence. Its a fuckamejillion light years away. But the point of the matter is that we see and recognize there's another backyard over there and before we saw it, we theorized that it might be there. So when we found it, we weren't taken aback.

Again, I don't advocate starting from scratch, because it IS all we have, but that we don't know near as much as some would believe. The information we have, we have only our perspective of it.

The whole idea of the scientific process is to separate our opinion from the measurable fact though. This is all why I don't like it when people say we don't know as much as we like to think we do. Because its really the other way around, we know more than people tend to give us credit for. We certainly don't know everything by any means, but at the same time what we do know would blow the mind of the average person on the street.

Our perspective is by its very nature changing the outcome.

Welcome to quantum mechanics. That actually happens on a quantum level. The observation of something will change the outcome. Its one of the reasons quantum mechanics is so god damn scary. It reacts to the fact its being observed. Because quantum mechanics is probability. The very act of observing it makes it resolve into a probable outcome. Different outcomes are of course possible so multiple results may be seen with the same experiment. Its also possible that the other results that did not occur in our dimension occurred in another dimension at the same time.

IE for every possible outcome, there exists a dimension where that occur was the one that occurred.

[Gravekeeper]

We have come to a crossroads however. One where I must excuse myself. Not because I think that there is no point in me trying to convince you, but that I do not think there is anything said that would convince me. Which is not fair to you. I question everything, even questioning why I question. If there comes a point I think that I am becoming a wall, I remove myself from the path, so others can maybe make some progression.

I didn't know we were actually arguing anything, I thought we were just having an interesting conversation. In fact it seemed like I was lending scientific credence to your opinion >.>

Edit: Crap did I just edit out my own reply to Andara? I did too. Fffff-

So, uh....Andara. TL;DR Scientifically speaking you're completely right. Our universe is only what we can observe from our own big bang. There could be an infinite number of universes all around us. <cough>

[Mytical]

We were not arguing. Debating in a friendly manner, but I hold myself to the same things I do others. Ie if somebody I am debating becomes a wall, I depart from the debate. Since I am finding myself a wall, it would be only fair to remove myself from it also

[Kheldarson]

I didn't know we were actually arguing anything, I thought we were just having an interesting conversation. In fact it seemed like I was lending scientific credence to your opinion >.>

Edit: Crap did I just edit out my own reply to Andara? I did too. Fffff-

So, uh....Andara. TL;DR Scientifically speaking you're completely right. Our universe is only what we can observe from our own big bang. There could be an infinite number of universes all around us. <cough>

And you had such a nice reply to her too.

I will say, I do love this alternate theory you're giving on what God is. It's striking me as a sort of Deist presentation.

[Mytical]

I enjoy learning things, and I have to say GK, you've given me a lot to digest.

[Andara Bledin]

Edit: Crap did I just edit out my own reply to Andara? I did too. Fffff-

*laughs* Whoops.

A shame I didn't get to see the original draft.

[Gravekeeper]

And you had such a nice reply to her too.

I know, qq.

I will say, I do love this alternate theory you're giving on what God is. It's striking me as a sort of Deist presentation.

It is somewhat yeah, I'm kind of a pandeist when you get right down to it. Its the best conclusion I've come up with so far that fits within current scientific parameters. I will adjust further as needed if we discover anything else super nifty out there.

I enjoy learning things, and I have to say GK, you've given me a lot to digest.

Glad to be of nerd service. I always feel a bit left out in theist vs atheist debates. Because I can easily argue for and against some of the points of either side >.>