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I don't think "this belief has negative consequences" is a good argument; we can only reach the truth by sincerely looking for it.

To my mind the very concept of free will is nonsense; as soon as you make a sincere effort to pin it down it breaks down. Yes, there is no absolute proof that it's impossible, but like the second law of thermodynamics, I would be much more surprised to see it violated than, IDK, finding a real magnetic monopole.

Very well put!

> I don't necessarily see science as trivial pursuit because of our human limitations

Me neither, quite the opposite, but the problem you are describing has always been a problem when discussing metaphysics, as it is commonly called.

Science is aware of its limitations, that's what makes it science.

But sometimes, people tend to conflate a materialistic world view (maybe even strong determinism) with believing in the scientific method.

The "belief" I mean here is strongly tied to assigning the appropriate role in ones thinking to scientific facts.

Proving an all-encompassing scientific world view is a logical paradox.

> But sometimes, people tend to conflate a materialistic world view (maybe even strong determinism) with believing in the scientific method.

I would say more than sometimes. It seems that if you're not like that, you're immediately labeled religious.

Religious is also a modern pejorative. It's pretty silly the way it's used given that extreme atheism is just as dogmatic as so called religious faith.

Disbelief in specific magical thinking of ancient people and belief in the magical thinking of ancient peoples are not all that similar.

Though I see how they can look that way when you intentionally omit details about the claims of either side, as human discourse is reduced to Tweet size comments of negligible value.

Nowadays there's many believers of simulation theory, which is pretty much magical thinking.

And like religion that belief is based on social memes, not on science.

Right but people are complex beings susceptible to social memes. Science fundamentally is a tool, but so is writing, which was used to establish and disseminate religion (in the beginning was the Word). The bible might contain wisdom and good lessons, but it's value is obfuscated and degraded by fundamentalist fanatics. The same can happen with the products of science.

I like to disturb materialists, aka believers in the mechanical universe, with three observations: physics stands on GR and QM; GR says that any thing can dissolve into light (photons) that can, in principle, form any other thing; QM says that the entire universe evolves as one entity, that QM calls the wave function.

>GR says that any thing can dissolve into light (photons) that can, in principle, form any other thing

That's doubtful, source?

>QM says that the entire universe evolves as one entity, that QM calls the wave function.

It's local, but mystics expect nonlocal one.

Scientific knowledge, like all knowledge, is fallible. All we can hope to do is correct errors and generate better explanations.

There is no "ultimate truth" or airtight reliable outlook at which we can stop and say we know everything there is to know -- that would be a dogmatic assertion, and it is false.

I think you're just describing human nature. We can look back and see how incomplete theories about the world led to horrible acts, or to averting our eyes from those acts because we thought it was justified, or because we thought there was no better way, or out of fear.

Yet there's the prevalent sense of "this time we're getting it right".

People did horrible acts because they did want to do those acts to those other people. They picked a theory to justify them.

I don't know, there's many stories of modern soldiers doing terrible things, coming back to the civilized world and living horrible lives due to PTSD and not being able to parse what they did.

Are you suggesting every one of those soldiers for example, go out to war with the intent of killing children? Are you not open to the idea that the sense of normalcy can be shifted by the environment and context? Are you familiar with the milgram experiments?

I'm familiar with Milgram experiments. To refer to recent facts, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country after the start of the war in Ukraine [1] Reasons vary but I think both of us remember the wave of male migrants when Russia called for mobilization in October 2022. Some of them probably didn't want to get killed, others didn't want to kill people.

I'm not merciful about this: the people of a country are responsible for who governs them, sense of normalcy notwithstanding.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_following_t...

Somehow I can’t blame the people of North Korea for the crimes of Kim Jung Un. Fill in the country and leader of your choice there.

Of course the longer they have been brainwashed the less they have matter to think about. North Korea is an edge case now but we have plenty of countries with a forever president. Once it gets to 20 years it got so much time to shape the country to ensure further 20 years of power that's basically over. People had chances to change the president before. Some of those countries have periodic rebellions, other are silent. Even North Korea had less than 20 years of a Kim at a certain point. It was coming from a destructive war, etc, and yet...

I think that the USA have a good balance with their two 4 years presidential terms. If one of their next presidents asks to raise it to 3 terms, be prepared to get a forever president there soon and all that it means.

>especially with how easily theories of predeterminism tend to enable unproductive, nihilistic outlooks

That's an essential claim, not doubt. First, you're wrong that determinism is a synonym for predeterminism, science doesn't support it, because predeterminism contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Next you're wrong that nihilism is bad. Is it a dogma? What if you're wrong? Especially since you know yourself your knowledge about nihilism is fragmentary and you spent only microscopic amount of effort to understand it and can't make grand conclusions about it. Then you also imply that delusion is somehow more constructive than truth. That's counterintuitive and needs proofs.