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Science cannot solve the final mystery

atanu

Member
Premium Member
That feels poorly worded and was either created or is being spun to suggest something that isn’t actually true...... :cool:

Poorly worded? Created? The linked article says:

"In a Socratic dialogue with Einstein, included as an appendix to Where Is Science Going?, Planck reflects:

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.""

The link to 'Where is Science going' is also provided in the article.

Where is science going? (Book, 1977) [WorldCat.org]
...
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
Yo, atanu.
..
And if science can't make absolute statements about reality, no one can.

(Absolute statements, being imaginary things, can be made about other imaginary things, of course.)

Yo. Yo. :p

I have red flagged an uncharacteristic unthinking statement of yours. Science does not make absolute statements. We make and WE ARE THE ULTIMATE MYSTERIES.
 
Last edited:

atanu

Member
Premium Member
See post #5.
So humans can't study humans, a thing can't study itself?

Yes. You have doubt? As I have done often, let me use Godel's own words:

https://www.iep.utm.edu/lp-argue/#H4

4. Gödel’s Own View

One interesting question that has not yet been addressed is: what did Gödel think his first incompleteness theorem implied about mechanism and the mind in general? Gödel, who discussed his views on this issue in his famous “Gibbs lecture” in 1951, stated,

So the following disjunctive conclusion is inevitable: Either mathematics is incompletable in this sense, that its evident axioms can never be comprised in a finite rule, that is to say, the human mind (even within the realm of pure mathematics) infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine, or else there exist absolutely unsolvable diophantine problems of the type specified . . . (Gödel 1995: 310).

That is, his result shows that either (i) the human mind is not a Turing machine or (ii) there are certain unsolvable mathematical problems. ...

From another source

https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-philosophie-2005-4-page-513.htm#

Godel on mechanism and Platonism

Interestingly, Godel himself also presented an anti-mechanist argument although a more cautious one; it was published only in his Collected Works, Vol. Ill, in 1995. That is, in his 1951 Gibbs lecture, Godel drew the following disjunctive conclusion from the incompleteness theorems : "either ... the human mind (even within the realm of pure mathematics) infinitely surpasses the power of any finite machine, or else there exist absolutely unsolvable diophantine problems." Godel speaks about this statement as a "mathematically established fact". Furthermore, Godel concludes that philosophical implications

In other words, even in case of well formulated mathematics, incompleteness is inbuilt. What to talk of a complex living system?
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Yo. Yo. :p

I have red flagged an unthinking statement of yours. Science does not make absolute statements. We make and WE ARE THE ULTIMATE MYSTERIES.
Nah, we're just one of them. And if anyone's going to solve how we work, it'll be science. It doesn't have even one serious competitor.

But you knew I'd say that.
 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”


Relativity, the Absolute, the Human Search for Truth: Nobel Laureate and Quantum Theory Originator Max Planck on Science and Mystery

Knowledge, which is what science tries to verify is not absolute because it is relative to who/where/what we are.

If one is looking for absolutes/certainty this can only be achieved relative to ourselves. Knowledge is dependent on us. Our position, perception, understanding, the questions we are capable of asking.

Even though through science, we try to use a collective approach, our perspective of the universe is that of being a human being. That is a relative position in the universe. We can not have knowledge of the universe from an absolute position.
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Please see post 24.
Wikipedia puts it like this (with my emphases) ─

Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modelling basic arithmetic. These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The theorems are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible.​

But unfortunately for generalizing this argument into a statement about the real universe, the real universe is not a formal axiomatic system at all, let alone one capable of modeling basic arithmetic.

However, as it stands science still has no way of making absolute statements, so can never say when the job is finished.
 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
It may be a mystery to science but people with religious faith understand.

People with religious faith create an artificial certainty by assuming they are the absolute. That the universe revolves around them. Everything else is relative to their existence.
 

beenherebeforeagain

Rogue Animist
Premium Member
Wikipedia puts it like this (with my emphases) ─

Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modelling basic arithmetic. These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The theorems are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible.​

But unfortunately for generalizing this argument into a statement about the real universe, the real universe is not a formal axiomatic system at all, let alone one capable of modeling basic arithmetic.

However, as it stands science still has no way of making absolute statements, so can never say when the job is finished.
It's important to recognize that the 'formal axiomatic system' of physics (or any other area of science) is a mathematical model of reality, not reality itself. A map, not the territory. The value of the map is whether or not it is useful (that is, corresponds to reality) for a given function. A map that includes elevation contours but not roads is probably not useful for getting from point a to point b...
 

Maximilian

Energetic proclaimer of Jehovah God's Kingdom.
Yo, atanu.

'The ultimate mystery of nature' is the nature of nature, and the only significant enquiry into that 'ultimate mystery' is science.

Science, of course, doesn't claim to make absolute statements about its subject matter, simply the best-informed and strongest-based views for the time being.

And if science can't make absolute statements about reality, no one can.

(Absolute statements, being imaginary things, can be made about other imaginary things, of course.)


And “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” -Maslow


Stated more explicitly, your Scientism or just Radical Positivism is a terribly parochial philosophy of knowledge. On this opinion, there is certainly absolutely nothing good or evil, right or wrong, exquisite or hideous. Even so, can it be tenable to believe that experimental truth is the one and only truth that exists? That simply no aesthetic, moral, metaphysical or otherwise putative facts obtain?


Abiding by this view, for starters, the Atheist who rapes a little kid to death ( or engages in this: Abortistas atacan a católicos que defendían la Catedral de San Juan ) is doing absolutely nothing wrong. Exactly why ought we agree to such a conclusion resulting merely from an epistemological limit? Isn’t this an indication that you ought to unlock the ambit of your beliefs and incorporate all the other different types of truth that abound?


Withal, the core principles of Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem altogether gainsays Radical Positivism’s initial assumption. In fact, Science is suffused with assumptions that can never be verified scientifically. The epistemology of radical positivism, as a result, abrogates science itself.


Take, for instance, the concept of induction. It just cannot be scientifically defended. Attempting to render a conclusive inductive line of reasoning for radical positivism is ridiculous as this begs the question by presupposing the legitimacy of inductive reasoning, to begin with!


All the more devastating to your beliefs is the fact that radical positivism is self-refuting. At its heart, this pernicious conviction demands that we not accept any belief that cannot be scientifically verified. But what of that very supposition? It cannot per se be scientifically tested out much less corroborated. As a result, we ought not to believe it. Your Radical Positivism, as a result, asphyxiates itself.


Alternatively, as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem makes evident, ‘Whatsoever may be bounded cannot explicate itself without referring to that which is without itself - some postulate whose certainty is unobtainable.’


This is just what famed Physicist and Mathematician James Clerk Maxwell alluded to when he came to the conclusion, “Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent, it must have been created.”
 
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