Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

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> Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :)

I see no reason to assume that question is beyond the reach of empiricism, which has been (both by its own standard and by naive common sense) effective in a way that alternatives have not. Non-empirical approaches may be able to construct self-consistent theories, but there is an infinitude of self-consistent theories, the overwhelming majority of which are useless under naive common sense. I trust empiricism because I was able to get there in Neurath's boat fashion from the everyday naive common sense that we all live by in practice.

> You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious.

I don't accept your claim. To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical. (At least, my experience - under formal empiricism, naive common sense, and along the path between them - is that theories that involved entities detached from empirical consequences were misleading, and less effective than theories that did without such entities).

> To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism

You are taking a very strong (and controversial) philosophical position without perhaps realizing it.

I'm aware. I've not found the counterarguments listed there convincing. Quine's argument seems to be that since he can't see how to make the analytic/synthetic distinction rigorous it must be impossible to do so, which simply doesn't follow. And since I take the position not as an a priori principle but based on my empirical experiences of what kind of theorising has been effective or ineffective, it isn't self-defeating at all.

>And since I take the position not as an a priori principle but based on my empirical experiences of what kind of theorising has been effective or ineffective, it isn't self-defeating at all.

That is the same defense Ayer used. It doesn't amount to much, since if you don't mean to say that non-empirical statements are meaningless in some kind of objective sense, then saying that they're meaningless is just a highfalutin way of saying that you personally disapprove of them.

Non-empirical statements are meaningless in the same sense that fairies don't exist. It's not a priori impossible that a non-empirical but constructive/valuable/useful statement could exist - a black swan - just as it's not impossible that a fairy could exist - but it seems very unlikely and I'd put a very low weight on someone's claim to have seen one, given how often such claims have turned out to be false. When I dismiss something as non-empirical, that's the same kind of dismissal as saying something's a conspiracy theory - formally I'm not claiming that it's outright impossible, just unlikely (though in everyday language I might say "impossible", just as we do for conspiracy theories or fairies).

The strained analogy with fairies is obscuring your point. You seem to be using "meaningless" in a very unusual sense.

Whether or not non-empirical statements can be constructive or valuable is a separate question. Mathematics is non-empirical and strikes me as pretty constructive and valuable. But those terms are, ironically, so vague as to be almost meaningless in any case.

Maybe conspiracy theory is a bad example because they’re true often enough to not be like fairies or black swans at all.

Domestic mass surveillance is a debunked conspiracy theory, remember

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan

Do you think you contributed to the conversation or that anyone might have been missing part of the picture but you pointing out that black swans are a literal thing that are not uncommon unlike fairies that don’t exist or “black swans” (like “bull runs”) that are by definition extremely rare?

I once said “there’s no such thing as a bull run” in some context with a group of friends. Do you think you would have chimed in to say that there’s a big one in Madrid every year?

> "Non-empirical statements are meaningless"

This is a non-empirical statement, given that you probably don't believe that you can demonstrate the truth of it empirically.

Putting it another way, perhaps you might agree with the following statement?

"All legitimate knowledge is gained empirically."

But how do you know this? Did you reach this conclusion empirically?

So there must be some things that you know through non-empirical means.

> But how do you know this? Did you reach this conclusion empirically?

Yes I did, that was my point. I haven't solved and am not claiming to have solved the problem of induction - the generalisation from "a bunch of empirical knowledge turns out to be valuable/effective/legitimate and all the supposed non-empirical knowledge I've seen turns out not to be valuable/effective/legitimate" to "all valuable/effective/legitimate knowledge is empirical" rests on potentially shaky ground. But that's a problem that already exists when making ordinary, object-level generalisations about the universe; it doesn't render the conclusion any weaker than ordinary scientific conclusions.

That's only an empirical generalization if you can cache out "valuable/effective/legitimate" in genuinely empirical terms (at minimum, in terms of observer-independent observations free from value judgments).

> That's only an empirical generalization if you can cache out "valuable/effective/legitimate" in genuinely empirical terms (at minimum, in terms of observer-independent observations free from value judgments).

I can cash it out empirically as "generates accurate empirical predictions and suggests fruitful avenues for future investigation" (fruitful in the sense of ultimately leading to more detailed and accurate empirical predictions). That the measure of a theory is the accuracy of its predictions is of course a subjective human position (there are an infinity of possible measures on which to evaluate theories, and a priori no reason to prefer one over another), but again that's (a cautious Neurath's boat extension of) the common-sense way that we all evaluate theories in practice in everyday settings.

No, that's not even close to cashing out the generalization in empirical terms. To do this you'd need to specify exactly which observations would confirm or disconfirm it. Without the parenthesized parts, your gloss of the generalization remains vague and value-laden. With the parenthesized parts it is virtually tautological, since it's in the nature of empirical knowledge to generate accurate empirical predictions. It's surely not news to anyone that if forms of knowledge which lead to detailed empirical predictions are superior to other forms of knowledge, then empirical knowledge is superior to other forms of knowledge.

What you really seem to want to do, then, is argue from the nature of empirical knowledge itself to the conclusion that it is better than other methods of empirical knowledge. But that requires rational argument to back up the italicized statement above, not (just) an inductive generalization. And then we come back to the problem that it is impossible to find suitable premises for such an argument which can themselves be known empirically.

(For reference, the generalization we're talking about here is that "a bunch of empirical knowledge turns out to be valuable/effective/legitimate and all the supposed non-empirical knowledge I've seen turns out not to be valuable/effective/legitimate".)

> But that requires rational argument to back up the italicized statement above, not (just) an inductive generalization.

Why? Everyone evaluates ordinary, everyday knowledge in terms of its empirical predictions, so everyone seems to accept the italicised statement in practice, even if they'd argue for some sophisticated alternative in the abstract.

That sounds like you're saying something like this:

"I believe empiricism is true because empiricism seems to be true."

We strive to live our lives based on reason, so we should look for ways to understand the world that go beyond a circular argument.

Such lines of thinking exist. They have been well argued and debated and have much going for them. Plenty of places to start learning about them, but maybe start with Aristotle.

> We strive to live our lives based on reason

I don't think we do. Reason is a means to an end, not a goal in itself.

> so we should look for ways to understand the world that go beyond a circular argument.

I don't see it as circular, but even if it were, my point is it's impossible to do better: all of us accept everyday common sense before we can even begin to argue technical philosophy, and if we're willing to set it aside then there are infinitely many self-consistent things we could think and no reason to prefer one over another. So no amount of sophistry will ever get you away from having to believe in everyday common sense.

> Such lines of thinking exist. They have been well argued and debated and have much going for them. Plenty of places to start learning about them, but maybe start with Aristotle.

Please. You're dismissing rather than engaging. If you're not willing to actually contribute to the discussion then don't post at all.

I'm sorry you thought I was being dismissive. I felt I had reached the limit of my own pursuasiveness on the question and wanted to point you to somewhere better than me.

One final point I will try to make is that in thinking about how we know things, there's no suggestion that we need to set aside common sense. It's about starting with common sense and then seeing what we can add to it.

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