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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> Science taught me that it's all just atoms and the void, so there can't be any deeper point or purpose to the whole thing; the kind of meaning most people yearn for — Ultimate Meaning — simply doesn't exist.

I don't think that is something science can teach you. Science can give you the scientific method, but answering the question "Is the scientific method the only valid means of knowledge?" is philosophy not science. It seems the author is trying to smuggle in a particular philosophy under the guise of science.

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>It seems the author is trying to smuggle in a particular philosophy under the guise of science.

I couldn't agree more.

Further, I'll add another reason why one might find trouble with that statement: It seems that because of the usefulness of the scientific method, as far as I can tell the effect on human psychology appears to be such that we are in a time and place where we are buying into the idea that the ratio of x: human understanding, to y, the body of knowledge necessary for answering such questions the author considers is getting reasonably close to 1, otherwise the author would not say that.

It seems it may be the case that it is entirely possible there is even other intelligent life in the universe, who upon encountering us attempting to answer difficult questions, would regard us as we would regard our pet cats sitting in front of a book on particle physics.

Even still possible is that there is intelligent life lying outside our observable universe, or even outside our universe entirely, regarding us in a similar manner.

In the framework of our current knowledge, we look into the past at our forebearers and consider how much more we know; yet, they too looked into the past at their forebearers, and considered the same.

In what sense can something be said to exist if it's "outside our observable universe, or even outside our universe entirely"?

Especially if you assume that the scientific method is always valid--that all true statements can be determined empirically--you can't make statements like "Ultimate Meaning doesn't/does exist". If Ultimate Meaning cannot be defined, it cannot be tested for or measured, so no statements about it can be true or false. The answer to meaning would not be false, but null (or maybe 42).

Just like 42, "atoms and the void" here is just a science-flavored attempt to answer a non-question.

But if it cannot be measured it by definition cannot have any effect on reality so can be safely ignored.

I assume you mean that in the absolute sense, but one also has to realize that "cannot be measured" can also be a measure of our ability to measure things. So you certainly can have real effects that we're simply not able to measure.

And so in that sense, I'm not sure the premise follows, as some of the things we cannot measure are things like the conditions of the early universe, which certainly did effect[1] us.

[1] It affects us too, but I chose that word deliberately

sorry to ruin the joke if that's what it is, but this is sarcasm, right? (my point being: our instrumentation constantly gets better, and there are things that we can't now measure/might never be able to measure which have a material impact on things we can measure)

Positivism has fallen out of favor precisely because it cannot withstand its own criteria for meaning.

For example, the statement that "all true statements can be determined empirically" is not itself verifiable by empirical means.

What if you do do the determination of all true statements empirically? Is that not the empirical way to determine the truth of that all-inclusive statement?

> What if you do do the determination of all true statements empirically?

How would you demonstrate that you have done this? Particularly, how would you demonstrate that there is no true statement which you have not empirically demonstrated?

Gödel's incompleteness theorem already rules this out for mathematics, so why should we believe it about the universe?

Fair enough; I'll be a little more precise.

I think the correct way to state it is: "all true statements are either tautologies, or can be determined empirically (with arbitrarily high but not necessarily measure-1 probability)". This statement is itself a tautology, because tautologies are by definition true, and because "determined" implies some method of determination, which if it actually can be used to determine truth, means it can be used empricially. Determination and empiricism are secretly defined in terms of each other, basically. The reason this tautology is worth stating is that it gives a simple criterion for discarding non-questions: questions that have no method of determining whether they are true or false (with arbitrarily high probability), are always non-questions.

Guys, he's not talking about the Scientific Method. He's talking about Reductionism. As recent as a few centuries ago, it was in no way obvious to us that the universe was made out of Atoms and Math (as opposed to say, Adam Kadmon and Divine Inspiration). Continental Philosophers spent tons of energy on these types of questions.

It still isn't obvious to me ;)

Yes. Science based on methodological naturalism (where one only assumes naturalism). But I guess the success of the scientific method may add some support for metaphysical naturalism (where one actually believes that naturalism is true) too.

I thought that "atoms and void" was a concept from Greek philosophy; Democritus - and one could argue that Democritus wasn't even an atheist; he thought that the soul was composed of 'soul particles' and while he had unconventional ideas about gods for the time, it is not at all clear that he didn't believe in gods at all.

It's like saying that it's all just pixels, therefore these words you read don't have any meaning.

I don't see how this analogy applies at all. We are not viewing the universe from the outside looking in at the "words," but rather make up the universe ourselves. In some sense, we are the aforementioned pixels.

If we're the pixels, then things like your relationship with your parents are the words johnmarius are referring to. The relationships we have with other people cannot be seen coherently through the "atoms and the void" view.

(But they can be seen through the "we're here to play" view espoused by the author of this article.)

Confusing knowledge for purpose.

Or, understanding atoms (to this degree) is a long way from understanding a human being and our social and environmental context.

So, there's atoms and void. What are you going to do with your life?

(To the extent that's even a conscious choice.)

> I don't think that is something science can teach you

Science can teach you that "it's all just atoms and the void"; the other part of the sentence is inference. And interestingly a similar inference as I made as a teenager, though I wasn't eloquent enough to really discuss it with anybody.

The basic premise is that if you reject the notion of a deity, there isn't even any standard by which any configuration of the Universe could be more meaningful than any other configuration.

Except if it's your own standard, which leads to meaning being a feeling more than an objective measure.

> Science can teach you that "it's all just atoms and the void"

Science can only teach you about things that can be measured. There are limits to what we can measure. For example, can we accept string theory to be true without being able to measure the activity from the additional dimensions it predicts? How do we get around the problems of quantum physics where the movement of particles cannot be measured without altering the state of those particles?

I'd suggest that whilst science is a noble endeavour, there will be limits to what we can discover scientifically. At this point, will we find that scientific leaders fall back on 'leaps of faith' to explain what we can only form an educated guess at? Time will tell.

Going back to the "all just atoms and the void" statement, we can't even say that without understanding what dark matter and dark energy are, as there's good evidence that they are something that exists beyond the "atoms and the void" we're currently familiar with.

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