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Upcoming Episodes
| Date | Episode | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 11-28 | LD 5x07 | "Fully Dilated" |
| 12-05 | LD 5x08 | "Upper Decks" |
| 12-12 | LD 5x09 | "Fissure Quest" |
| 12-19 | LD 5x10 | "The New Next Generation" |
| 01-24 | Film | "Section 31" |
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Nope.
This inductive principle argument that we can’t know the sun will rise tomorrow, just that it always has before, was a cute little bit of philosophy when I was back in college.
But it has since been weaponized by religious people, arguing in bad faith, to undermine the credibility of science and legitimate their religious faith. They say we can’t know anything, therefore science is just built on faith anyway and is therefore no different than religion.
Again: nope.
The thing is, we know why the sun rises, not just that it always has. And it actually doesn’t always rise, at the poles, or during eclipses, and we can explain those too. We have a model that can predict much more minute events than the sun rising or not, in fact. We have devised experiments to strain and test our models and predictions. We throw out lots of ideas because they don’t bear out in tests.
Scientists don’t really talk about “knowing” things anyway. The bar a scientific theory must meet is being able to make testable predictions about the future. Maybe theory is always provisional and can never be proven but at some point we become fools not to accept it. Proof: prove yourself! To claim something doesn’t exist, based on the inductive principle, is to wave away the entire universe with a flick of the wrist as your opening argument.
If you still want to engage in this “we can’t really know anything” bullshit, that’s your choice. I no longer have any patience for it, having seen how it is being misused. It boils down to the “so you’re telling me there’s a chance” scene from Dumb and Dumber, where the guy chooses to focuses on the 0.0000000001% chance that something will happen, because hey it’s not zero.
We can’t know anyone is dead therefore death is social constructed? I guess life doesn’t exist either because you don’t know you are alive, you just have a lot of past anecdotal evidence that you are. Perhaps your atoms will scatter in 5 minutes from now and you will prove to have been an accidental particle fart of the universe that just happened to blow in on a breeze, and then blew out again. Who can say!!!???
Being that this is a Star Trek post I'll just add this.
Lt. Cmdr. Data: "Sir, our sensors are showing this to be the absence of everything. It is a void without matter or energy of any kind."
Commander Riker: "Yet this hole has a form, Data; it has height, width..."
Lt. Cmdr. Data: "Perhaps. Perhaps not, Sir."
Captain Picard: "That's hardly a scientific observation, Commander."
Lt. Cmdr. Data: "Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is, "I do not know". I do not know what that is, Sir."
“I don’t know” is quite different than “no one can ever know anything.”
That's fair. But the idea of approaching the universe from a standpoint of not being able to truly "know" is kind of the basis of all science isn't it? We can have evidence of something, maybe even enough evidence to make reliable, repeatable predictions in the context of our infinitely short existences, but it will forever and always be transient knowledge. Nothing in the universe is static and unchanging forever.