Comment by angoragoats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angoragoats | Hacker News Reader

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I absolutely do not agree that (a) is obviously true, for several reasons, so you are going to need to clarify and then provide some evidence to back that claim.

1) What does "understand objective reality" mean, specifically?

2) Please provide evidence that we currently do not "understand objective reality."

3) Please provide evidence that we do not possess the ability to _ever_ "understand objective reality."

> we all operate on it

[citation needed]

> prayer is in the domain of religious faith, so it's meaningless for a non-religious person to test it out

This is extremely presumptuous. What is your rationale that Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was "non-religious" at the time she conducted the experiment? (Hint: you'll need to show that she had a complete lack of religious belief, not only a lack of belief in the religion(s) you're familiar with.)

EDIT: there's also a whole load of other fallacious crap in your comment that I haven't even addressed. We cannot assume the universe was created at all for any purpose; atheism has nothing to do with "random accidents" or any supposed meaning attached to them; having no reason to assume something does not imply its negation, etc etc.

// 2) Please provide evidence that we currently do not "understand objective reality."

Would you trust yourself, or any other human, or humanity, to answer the question "describe the true process of the universe's creation?"

Curious about the word 'true' there, are you asking about the Planck Epoch of the big bang?

Sorry, did you mean to quote something different in my post? Questions are not evidence. It’d be extremely helpful if you gave a specific definition of “understand objective reality” as I asked in #1 before moving on to 2 and 3.

If you’re saying that “understand objective reality” means “knowing the true process of the universe’s creation” I’d counter that baked into that is the assumption that the universe was created, which is not necessarily the case, so you’d additionally need to provide evidence for that.

That question is implicitly suggesting that the universe was created. If that turns out not to be the case, then not even an omniscient being could answer it correctly. It would be equivalent to asking “describe the true process by which the Earth came to be flat.”

Of course, humanity does not understand everything about the universe. For instance, there is still the huge open problem of unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics, which is essential to understanding the very early universe (the standard model starts to lose accuracy prior to 10^(-32) seconds after the Big Bang [0]).

But that does not mean humanity will never understand such things.

And in case you are thinking “we’ll never know for sure; we’ll only have theories”:

I contend that all knowledge is inherently probabilistic. To claim to know something with absolute, 100% certainty is a fallacy [1]. After studying math my whole life, I am pretty confident that multiplication of integers is commutative. Is it possible that I have misunderstood numbers for my whole life, or that I am hallucinating right now, or that all of humanity has made the same mistake throughout all of history without realizing it? Yes. Just very, very improbable.

But that does not take away from the notion of understanding. One can understand an idea, while simultaneously recognizing that there is a small chance their understanding is flawed.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch

[1] The notions of “probability 1” and “certain” are actually distinct; for instance, if you flipped a coin for every integer, the probability that at least one would turn up heads is 1, even though it is possible for them to all land tails. That being said, the existence of real-life phenomena (cosmic rays, parasites, etc.) that could affect our minds at any given time ensures that no claims of knowledge can ever have probability exactly 1.

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