Re:I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its pre...
by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC on Friday December 20, 2013 @06:20PM
(#6944807)
Well, nothing wrong with trusting theories with more/clearer/better evidence more, of course. Now, apparently, I interpreted your previous post incorrectly as to how you go about distinguishing better evidence from worse evidence, but my main point that I was trying to make still stands: Your distinction is somewhat arbitrary and I have the strong impression that you aren't really aware of it.
For example, you are constantly referring to the here-and-now as some kind of special category of evidence. You do realize that there isn't really any "here and now"? There is no "sun here now" - there is only a brain here and now that processes signals that we hypothesize come from photo receptors in the eyes, which we further hypothesize were stimulated by waves of electromagnetic radiation, which in turn we hypothesize has previously been traveling for around eight minutes from what we hypothesize to be a star, about which we further hypothesize how it works internally, which is part of why we hypothesize that it is still creating those electromagnetic waves, even though we wouldn't know for another eight minutes if it had disappeared (or so we hypothesize). That's a whole lot of hypotheses and indirect evidence and quite a bit of looking into the past involved to call that "present knowledge from the here and now", don't you think?
And no, we can not observe the cause - you only can observe the effects, ever. In the case of the sun, that is the electromagnetic radiation that we hypothesize to be created by a star in our neighbourhood.
And essentially the same thing is true for the big bang: We see its effects, among those the microwave background, which is electromagnetic radiation which we hypothesize to be coming from the horizon of when the universe became transparent, which we hypothesize to be 13.7 billion light-years away, ... - and if you have a radio telescope, it can easily be confirmed by the senses daily.
So, if you were to apply your standards consistently, you probably would have to consider belief in the existence of the sun right now or belief in the existence of bacteria and viruses (you can not observe those with your senses, in case you mean that a little bit too literally) as a matter of faith.
I would think that that's silly, and it's much saner to say that the empirical evidence for the sun and the big bang and bacteria is all pretty strong, possibly varying a bit in strength, but without any of the qualitative differences that you seem to be implying.
For example, you are constantly referring to the here-and-now as some kind of special category of evidence. You do realize that there isn't really any "here and now"? There is no "sun here now" - there is only a brain here and now that processes signals that we hypothesize come from photo receptors in the eyes, which we further hypothesize were stimulated by waves of electromagnetic radiation, which in turn we hypothesize has previously been traveling for around eight minutes from what we hypothesize to be a star, about which we further hypothesize how it works internally, which is part of why we hypothesize that it is still creating those electromagnetic waves, even though we wouldn't know for another eight minutes if it had disappeared (or so we hypothesize). That's a whole lot of hypotheses and indirect evidence and quite a bit of looking into the past involved to call that "present knowledge from the here and now", don't you think?
And no, we can not observe the cause - you only can observe the effects, ever. In the case of the sun, that is the electromagnetic radiation that we hypothesize to be created by a star in our neighbourhood.
And essentially the same thing is true for the big bang: We see its effects, among those the microwave background, which is electromagnetic radiation which we hypothesize to be coming from the horizon of when the universe became transparent, which we hypothesize to be 13.7 billion light-years away, ... - and if you have a radio telescope, it can easily be confirmed by the senses daily.
So, if you were to apply your standards consistently, you probably would have to consider belief in the existence of the sun right now or belief in the existence of bacteria and viruses (you can not observe those with your senses, in case you mean that a little bit too literally) as a matter of faith.
I would think that that's silly, and it's much saner to say that the empirical evidence for the sun and the big bang and bacteria is all pretty strong, possibly varying a bit in strength, but without any of the qualitative differences that you seem to be implying.