IMO
I'm saying consensus is irrelevant. Indeed, the closer to 100% that we get the more likely we are to be wrong. If 60% of experts believe one thing and 40% something else then go with the majority. When they all agree, then look for a problem because either the question is too simple or it is affected by their premises.
Your folksy advise is not totally off the mark if we limit it to those areas that are on the edge of our understanding. There is nothing wrong with strong skepticism in such cases. And in knowledge acquisition, we must always be open to the possibility that new information, new discoveries will alter our understanding of how the world works. But that is only the explanation. The world itself will work the way it always has and as we expect.
I find, however, that many of your posts advocate for an unreasonable level of skepticism in the scientific process on the whole.
Of course we do for those categories of things we know. But few important questions and no questions depending on the nature of consciousness can be answered today. You're better off asking a shaman whether to marry Nicole or Violet.
Excellent! A bold admission that we do know some things.
If all your *important* questions are things like, "How exactly did the universe begin, and if it began, what was before?", are hardly the most important questions. Such questions are beyond our current ability to answer with any satisfaction and we may never be able to completely answer such questions. The only option, therefore, is to make peace with not being able to know and leave it at that. There are many more pressing day-to-day problems that we can set our minds to and attempt to solve.
As to consciousness, I do not see it as being nearly as elusive as you seem to imply. In fact, compared to our historical philosophical understanding of consciousness, I think we have come a long way in our understanding. Is it still immensely complex and not fully understood? Of course, but we are much more knowledgeable now than we have ever been.
NO. I have to disagree. The perspective is expanding but is still highly limited and mostly unidirectional. Most science is still highly reductive.
Again, you really agree with me here, but for some personal reason or bias you are unwilling to give science credit where credit is due. I wonder why that is.
I believe we will always be wrong about everything but we'll always get closer and closer to the truth.
Here we are saying the exact same thing, only you color degrees of confidence as uniformly wrong. Again, not an accurate representation of what is happening. It is great to see acknowledgement that progress is being made and we are getting closer to the truth.
You'll know we are right about something when someone can accurately predict the shape of a cloud in twenty minutes. Or predict which sparrow will fall from the sky next.
Not going to happen and is unnecessary. The cosmos is not fully deterministic in the way you suggest. In complex systems in that are extremely sensitive to initial conditions, very small variations in initial conditions result in dramatically different outcomes over time. Our climate is driven by the randomly varying output of solar radiation. The element of randomness means that the exactness of prediction that you expect can never be achieved. The most one can do is develop probabilities of what will occur which will become more inaccurate the further one projects into the future.
Is your goal to pick an unachievable standard by which to measure science so that you may always hold it up as falling short? To what purpose? Does science having value challenge something you wish to shelter from science, or the scientific process?
We understand some thing reasonably well but only because we don't need to understand everything about any process or event to make it work for us. Animals use tools and ancient people used counterweights with out much knowledge of gravity. What do you need to know except weight and distance from the fulcrum?
Another great admission. Thank you. We don't *need* to understand things, we *want* to understand things. We could go through life as the rest of the living world, relying solely on our biology and instinctual behavior to survive the elements, disease, injury, inter and intra species competition. Is that your preference? If not, if you see advantage to our ability to reason, to extrapolate from our experiences and learn to mitigate and solve the risks and threats of the natural world, why limit such knowledge acquisition? Why discontinue this process? I can only conclude that the progress of science challenges something that you wish to shelter from this process.
Corroboration is irrelevant. This isn't to say there is no reason for peer review merely that Peer review is not part of the scientific method and the fact that peers agree is irrelevant to the accuracy of anything. If someone designs a poor experiment anyone can point out its flaws and even a child might see the king has no clothes. I have no problem with peers, the problem is Peers. The problem is believers think that Peers know everything and when there is consensus there is Truth. This wasn't even true back before science was bought and paid for as it is today.
Softening your stance, becoming more reasoned, reasonable.
Many of your criticisms I have heard from you here and in other threads are valid to a degree. Scientists are human after all, and like the rest of us are flawed and fallible. That is why I say that scientific principles and standards mitigate this fallibility, they do not eliminate it.
This mitigation process works and you have acknowledge that it does. We are making progress. We simply have to be patient and accept the fact that there are a whole lot of very difficult questions that will never get answered in our lifetime. All we can do is focus on the problems we can make progress on.
We are mostly saying the same thing but from different perspectives. I am sympathetic to almost everything you say but my perspective is somewhat different. This is caused largely by experience (I believe) and by the fact I am now more a metaphysician than a scientist and I have two distinct metaphysics; modern and ancient science.
And I agree that we are essentially saying the same thing, and both acknowledging that science isn't perfect but that it works and is making progress.
I think our main difference is that you may have beliefs that you want to keep separate from the scientific process, scientific inquiry. Doing that shields those beliefs and leaves them fully vulnerable to all our flaws and fallibility.
