SvetlanaButosky t1_j6rvkdx wrote
We should all be skeptics unless we are omniscience gods, lol.
Nobody can ever know everything there is to know about anything, its just not possible, this means everything people produce will be incomplete (even scientific facts), which is why we should never be absolutist about anything, even for the simplest basic facts.
We know enough to survive and do stuff, that's it, reality is far too vast and complex to be understood in its entirety.
bensonnd t1_j6sfnim wrote
I want to live long enough (read way longer than we do now) to master multiple subjects in math and science, like neuroscience/neurology, computer science, physics, quantum physics/mechanics, but also including some of the social sciences like linguistics, economics, anthropology, and sociology.
There's something to learn between them all. It feels like people, societies, and neurons in the brain all look like they coalesce in ways similar to what we see with matter in physics.
Major-Vermicelli-266 t1_j6stm37 wrote
I don't know what that last part is supposed to mean but if you do, don't forget to study medicine.
SvetlanaButosky t1_j6udl9d wrote
You should study AI brain chip instead, because its the holy grail of making people near omniscience.
bildramer t1_j6thqfz wrote
We should be skeptical, but not too skeptical, but of course also be skeptical about who got to define our idea of "too skeptical" and how. Many people seemingly assume they can skip any actual skepticism, and go pick up all the ideas labeled skepticism, and discard all the ones labeled too much skepticism, and be done, and moreover, that they have already done this. You see it all the time in polemics about "critical thinking in schools", for example - the idea that the more critical thinking, the more children's beliefs and opinions (and votes) will end up similar to yours.
mackinator3 t1_j6sjr6r wrote
Well, you can't know it's not possible.
It also doesn't mean everything is incomplete. You can still get lucky and have a complete theory, without knowing everything.
You are presenting such an absolutist argument against absolutism lol
bensonnd t1_j6sq9e1 wrote
OP doesn't seem to be talking about absolutism at all. They're talking about how the stuff we know, including the theories you mentioned, still have underlying probabilities (uncertainty) that we can look at and be almost entirely sure, but never 100%.
It's like determining a sphere's superposition. We can probabilistically determine where a sphere is at by analyzing it in the context of an infinite number of planes, but not the actual sphere itself. And we can extrapolate to the space around it to fill in the gaps between the sphere and its polyhedron representation. But by definition, that gap is uncertain. We can model the gap if it's that important, but it generally isn't. The representation is good enough.
mackinator3 t1_j6sqpl6 wrote
They explicitly says absolutist.
VitriolicViolet t1_j6v9w3z wrote
eh, one day we may know everything, a billion years is a long time.
never seen a convincing reason why we cant learn everything, we just need better tools (all of history supports it)
bonEzz_1 t1_j6xonf6 wrote
to me the problem is that you can never be sure you know everything, since you can always ask "is there something we are missing?", and the answer has to be, by definition "we don't know".
in practical terms it doesn't really mean much since we can get by just fine by doing "what works", but in theoretical terms I don't think you can ever be sure that you have learned everything, that you haven't missed something that would change your understanding of things, and in that sense, you can never be sure of the truth of what you know, so you are forced to remain sceptical about it
SvetlanaButosky t1_j6yumj4 wrote
Exactly, how can we ever know that we have known everything there is to know about reality?
As long as new things are discovered, it will never be complete.
He assumes that we will reach a point when nothing new will ever be discovered for the rest of time, that's a very big claim. lol
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